Dr. Miles Spar, the Medical Director for Vault Health is an expert in men's health. On Episode 458 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, we discuss peptides, what they are, how they work, and how to safely use them to improve your health and fitness.
Transcript
Let's Say Hello
[00:02:16.050] – Allan Rachel, how you doing?
[00:02:18.120] – Rachel Great. Allan, how are you today?
[00:02:20.850] – Allan I'm doing good. You know, we're doing a lot of people might not know about the behind the scenes part of a podcast. We record these intros in this discussion sometimes a week or two or three ahead of when an actual episode airs. And so in this case, we're recording a few weeks ahead because I'm planning a trip to the United States to see family get my crap out of my daughter's garage and then, of course, to vote. And so I'm pretty excited about that.
[00:02:47.700] – Allan You know, we got into covid. I was a little concerned. You know, my mother and her mother are not in the best of health and my stepmother isn't either. So, you know, with this thing and all the ramifications of being an at-risk person, you know, it's one of those things you're thinking about on a pretty regular basis when you're sitting around in your apartment with nothing else to do, which is why I go back and listen to that Slip-to-Success Episode, because that's really where my head was, is that I might not see our parents again.
[00:03:17.790] – Allan So it's a little daunting, but I'm happy to be going back to get some of my stuff out of my daughter's garage and ship some of it down here. We started pricing that out. And it's you have to in your head, justify do I really want to pay that much to ship that thing, to have it down here? And I'm hopeful the answer for a lot of that is no. But you know how things go when you're trying to get rid of things that you own.
[00:03:41.850] – Allan You end up toting them with you.
[00:03:43.680] – Rachel Oh, for sure. I'm glad you get to come up and visit your family. It sounds wonderful.
[00:03:49.080] – Allan Well, how are things going for you?
[00:03:50.370] – Rachel Oh, good, good. The weather's been great. It's been great for running in the mornings and we just got a new weight set for our gym. So I'm excited to unwrap everything and get to it.
[00:04:01.500] – Allan OK, tell us about that.
[00:04:03.390] – Rachel We bought an Olympic bar and a full set of weights, so we've got everything from forty-five down to two and a half and just excited to get it all out. It took about six or eight weeks I think, to get here. So we've been anxiously awaiting like a little much, but yeah, we can't wait to get it unwrapped.
[00:04:23.190] – Allan Well, that's that's one of the things, as you know, covid came along and people wanted to start training at home. They're like, well, I could outfit a home gym, but you got to start, you know, figuring out the equipment and then you go to buy the equipment. Well, you're not the only one. And so a lot of these places stocked out. I was looking at a Concept2 rower because back in June, I didn't necessarily want to wait all the way until like January when I could go back and get because I have a little rower. It's not a Concept2. But I was thinking I'd just buy a Concept2 and ship that down here and then I'll sell my rower up there. But they had a waiting list and I was like, well, OK, I'll just if I, if I have a waiting list, I may as well wait. You know, it was a shame. So but that. Good, good, good. You have to let us know how it goes.
[00:05:07.050] – Rachel For sure. Absolutely.
[00:05:08.400] – Allan Post pictures on Facebook.
[00:05:10.140] – Rachel Absolutely.
[00:05:11.520] – Allan All right. So one more thing. I do have to let you know, we're recording this interview, Dr. Spar on peptides. And just for full disclosure, Vault Health, which is the company that Dr. Spar founded and works for, is a sponsor of the show. So if you do visit Vault Health, I do want you to know that we get a little bit of a kickback on that if you schedule your call and get on your call.
[00:05:37.950] – Allan They do. They do pay us for that referral, but it doesn't cost you any more. And I'm not telling you that's who you need to go to or that you even need to do peptides. But I wanted to have an episode out there because so many people will start hearing about this. And it sounds really magical and it sounds really cool, but there's some pitfalls. So how about we go ahead and get into the episode? And Rachel, I will be right back with you afterwards.
Interview
[00:06:46.140] – Allan Dr. Spar, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:06:48.720] – Dr.Spar Thanks, Allan. Great to be here.
[00:06:50.670] – Allan You know, today we're going to talk about peptides. And I as I kind of follow the health and fitness space, I, I tend to put one foot out there in the area I call biohacking, just kind of know maybe what's going to be coming down the line five years, ten years down the line. But that curve is accelerating.
[00:07:12.600] – Allan You used to hear about something and say, OK, when's that going to hit mainstream? And it would be a generation later, like with some medications. And then you'd hear about this new thing bodybuilders were doing and it would be mainstream maybe five years later. And now I can listen to a podcast like Ben Greenfield or Dave Asbury. And they were talking about SARMs a year ago, two years ago or three years ago.
[00:07:37.140] – Allan And it was happening then and then. Now times, you know, I think a lot of the things that we're calling biohacking are actually coming so fast and getting mainstream so quickly with technology we have and the communications we have. It's really kind of amazing what's happening right now.
[00:07:54.330] – Dr.Spar It is. It's exciting and a little bit overwhelming. So I love that you have the podcast because it's really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff and to know it's the what isn't, what's safe, what isn't and what's proven. And like you said, it's good when things move fast, but it also means sometimes we don't have all the data yet. So it's great to kind of talk about, well, what do we know and what do we not know that you need to watch out for?
[00:08:16.740] – Allan Yeah, and even in 2020, we still have snake oil salesmen.
[00:08:21.370] – Dr.Spar Obviously.
[00:08:22.170] – Allan They come to town and try to sell us something that isn't going to help us at all.
[00:08:26.070] – Dr.Spar Yes, especially on fitness. That's a big one. You know, one of the number ones where you get questionable recommendations and products.
[00:08:33.870] – Allan Because we're eager to do something and everybody likes that easy button concept of what's what's the one thing I can do. And I'd love to say, yeah, say maybe one day science will figure that out, but we don't quite have it. But peptides are really, really interesting to me because you're literally going in and the way I understand it and correct me if I'm saying this wrong, but I can think of your genetic code is like an operating system for our body.
[00:09:03.030] – Allan And in general, it's going to function and do certain things. Yet we can introduce things like peptides in there, which then basically turns on and off or dimmer switch. However, you want to kind of look at it in your head the way that our genetic code is working and cause our body to do things good or bad. I mean, but most of what we're going to try to do here is some good.
[00:09:26.610] – Dr.Spar Yeah, I think it's a good way of putting it, actually, because peptides, basically they're signaling molecules. Right? So they're different from exogenous hormones or hormones you take in or separately, even though it's confusing to some peptides or hormones. But in general, when we think about hormones, we think of instead of relying on the body to produce something like testosterone, we're going to give testosterone because the body isn't producing enough or for whatever reason or even using growth hormone, which we'll talk about later, just taking extra growth hormone.
[00:09:54.660] – Dr.Spar And that's a little more of a big hammer, right? Because you're just basically saying, yeah, we're not signaling the genetic code, like you said. We're just basically saying, yeah, whatever you genes turn off, we got this. Peptides are a little more elegant. They rely on the body's own natural rhythms and their natural processes of when they're going to produce something like a hormone. And yet it helps to coax them to maybe do that at a little higher volume.
[00:10:20.400] – Dr.Spar Just like you said, I love that the dimmer switch. It's a great way of putting it.
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[00:11:58.710] – Allan Now, I remember reading about SARMS a few years ago and thinking, OK, this is kind of interesting cutting edge stuff, but you had to basically, if you went, looked online for what SARMS were, they'd say, yeah, we'll sell you this. But it's not for human consumption. You know, what? Why are you selling it to someone that's not a scientist? But they were. What's the difference between SARMS and peptides?
[00:12:21.240] – Dr.Spar Sure. They're actually they're actually really different. So peptides are chains of amino acids, proteins, which are what most enzymes and a lot of hormones and a lot of substances in the bodies are large chains of amino acids. But peptides are smaller chains of about 50 amino acids or less. And like I said, they're signalling molecules. So they're naturally produced in the body. And that's a key thing because SARMs are synthetic peptides are all naturally produced in the body. There's about 7000 that are naturally produced and some of them are also made available to use as well to give yourself or to take.
[00:12:57.750] – Dr.Spar And about 60 are actually approved by the FDA. And these have the same type of impacts as hormones in that whatever their direct thing that they are coaxing along will cause that thing they're coaxing along to have a broader impact. So the peptides themselves are very elegant. They're very specific to like one hormone or one chain in a pathway that they will stimulate. But it's really only that one thing that they'll stimulate. So, for example, we'll talk later about peptides that stimulate growth hormone release.
[00:13:31.230] – Dr.Spar That's really all they do. They don't have by their actions. And then they rely on the impact of growth hormone to have a bunch of actions and example of peptides that many people might have heard of are these GLP1 agonist for diabetes like Victoza or Semaglutide or Ozempic? These are newer medications for diabetes that help with weight loss that are great. And they really only work on this glucagon-like peptide that they stimulate the release of and that then helps a lot with insulin sensitivity.
[00:14:01.200] – Dr.Spar Whereas SARMs. They're are actually synthetic. They're small molecules like peptides. That's really the only thing that's the same. And the reason that they're selective, like we used to have SERMs, a selective estrogen receptor modulators, the SARMs are selective androgen receptor said the surge or things like tamoxifen and related estrogens. These are ones that are related to androgens, but they're selective in that. Hormones like androgens are hormones by definition means a hormone has impacts all over the body.
[00:14:30.720] Right. So that's what defines a hormone when you learn in med school a hormone, basically something that goes everywhere to every kind of tissue. So SARMs say, well, we don't really want to have impact all over the body for certain things that we're really trying to build muscle. We want something to be androgenic and muscle, but we don't want it to affect the liver and the kidney and the testes and shut down testicle production of testosterone. We want to just to really focus on building muscle or maybe also fat to lose some fat.
[00:14:57.630] – Dr.Spar So that's what SARMs are meant to do. They're actually broader molecules that look a lot like bigger hormones, but they're designed to specifically have less widespread impact than a whole hormone or whole steroid would be.
[00:15:15.690] – Allan It was interesting because when I was first reading about SARMs, I think, you know, the broad interest in this was how do I gain muscle? How do I lose fat? How to get more growth hormone, which also helps improve both of those. It was interesting to find out that there are peptides that can actually improve our immune function, which I think at the time of COVID. That's huge. Can you talk a little bit about that peptide or those the class of peptides and what they do?
[00:15:43.680] – Dr.Spar Yeah, absolutely. That's a big interest right now. And there's some really good studies on some of these peptides helping the immune system. I don't want to say that these are cures for COVID, but these are anything that really we can make specific claims related to COVID about because there haven't been studies were uncovered. However, there are some good studies in some of these with virus in general in helping boost the immune system as it protects us from viruses. So the main ones are ones that are initially produced from the thymus gland.
[00:16:14.880] – Dr.Spar We all have a thymus gland, but it involutes as we age in that thymus gland is what really produces a lot of our immune system. Cells are T-cells are named after our thymus land and those are the some of the important cells, our immune system. And they also help not only just produce these T-cells, but they help tell the T-cells how to operate and how to do what they do best. And yet over time, that thymus gland, like I said, invalutes.
[00:16:38.280] – Dr.Spar And so it gets less active. So these peptides, especially one called Thymosin Alpha One, and you'll see it abbreviated TA1, really is something that naturally is produced in the thymus clan, but it's produced less and less as we age. So when you're over 40, have less of it. Yet it's very helpful to boost this type. The immunity called cell-mediated immunity, these T-cells, immunity that are really the most important arm of our immune system against viruses, we have like the antibody arm, which are great for bacteria and help a little bit with viruses.
[00:17:06.930] – Dr.Spar And that's what vaccines help with. But really for viruses, we really need this thymus that this T-cell arm, the cell-mediated immunity arm. And that's what times an alpha one helps, helps boost production of these T-cells and helps them mature better and helps teach them what to go against, what not to do. So they're actually used in autoimmune diseases because it helps teach the immune system. This Thymosin Alpha One does teaches the immune system.
[00:17:32.340] – Dr.Spar What's something that really we want to attack and what's our own self that we don't want to attack? And that's an autoimmune disease, right when you're attacking yourself. So they're used in viruses and autoimmunity and allergies. And then they also help, even with chronic infections like Lyme is a big one or chronic fatigue syndrome. That is unclear at Epstein Bar, which is another virus or Lyme.
[00:17:53.790] So, Thymosin Alpha One is the main one that we see very well studied. It's actually used in as a pharmaceutical. It's approved in over 70 countries around the world. So it's not a way out there. It doesn't happen to be FDA approved in this country for a lot of things, but it's a very safe peptide to use.
[00:18:10.980] – Dr.Spar The other one you hear about less so, but to some degree it's called Thymosin Beta Four. So I mentioned Thymosin Alpha One and this one is Thymosin Beta Four. That also has some immune-modulating activities, but that's more around cancer care that's used. And so I would really say for listeners that are interested in boosting immunity in a really sophisticated way, the Thymosin Alpha One is the way to go.
[00:18:35.680] – Allan Another area which I found kind of interesting and as I was reading the story on this is the guy just sort of accidentally somewhat overdosed, I guess. He shot himself up some peptides and he found himself in a position of excitement for about eight hours.
[00:18:54.300] – Dr.Spar Yeah.
[00:18:55.270] – Allan And so there are actually peptides that can improve your libido. Could you talk to them?
[00:19:00.300] – Dr.Spar Yeah, this is really exciting. And it's something that, like you said, it was found accidentally. So it's interesting. One of the hormones that leads to melanin in your skin and helps to promote skin pigment actually as a precursor to ACTH, which is a hormone that many of your listeners might know about, comes from the hypothalamus pituitary gland that can produce this hormone that produces skin darkening, but also the precursor to that hormone that produces skin darkening is called Melanotan.
[00:19:35.730] – Dr.Spar And that also actually helps with libido and erectile function from essentially acting way from a nerve stimulating erections as opposed to like Viagra and PDE5 inhibitors. Those all help promote vascular flow, right? So they help with the blood vessel part of erections. These help with the central nervous system being turned on. So it's all a nerve part of not just erections, but libido. And in fact, when they study this and they found the form that doesn't cause as much skin darkening because the first form just cause a lot of skin darkening and the libido isn't really helpful unless you really want to have really, really, really dark skin.
[00:20:14.070] – Dr.Spar So they found this basically it's Melanotan two, and they found this substance called PT141 or Bremelanotide, which is a derivative of Melanotan two and works the same way and stimulates this libido very strongly. They actually have it as an FDA approved medication for women with hypoactive sexual desire, especially post-menopause, because it works in men and women, because it's working in the brain, it's not working in the penis. It's working in the brain. I'm getting you turned on and that helps libido and it helps with erections.
[00:20:45.330] – Dr.Spar And especially helpful, though, off label, so to speak, for guys who have maybe tried Viagra or PDE5 inhibitors. And they're still not getting good erections because they're just not into it. And it's more of a mojo thing than just a blood flow thing. So these are very powerful and getting you turned on, you inject them or you do an intranasal an hour or so before sex.
[00:21:07.740] – Dr.Spar And like I said, it's an FDA approved drug for women. For men, we use it as well. It has some side effects to watch for. It can cause a little bit of nausea that's usually fleeting and some flushing. And it's not recommended for guys with really high blood pressure. But other than that, it's really well-tolerated and it works wonders in guys who are really frustrated because they've tried ordering Viagra online and they're still like, yeah, whatever.
[00:21:29.820] – Dr.Spar I don't even want to take it because I'm just not into it or I take it and I still don't really get an erection because I'm just I'm not into it. And this is works at that at that central nervous system level.
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[00:22:56.560] – Allan Now, I guess, you know, and of course, this is going to be the exciting one, is that there are quite a few peptides that can actually increase our growth hormone, which is another one of those hormones that declines as we age.
[00:23:11.710] – Dr.Spar Yeah, and growth hormone know, I'm sure your listeners know, growth hormone and it's kind of like the fountain of youth in a way, because it really does. Growth hormone is really responsible for muscle growth and fat loss and helping us feel more energetic, helping us sleep better, helping us with brain cognition. And it does decline as you age. It's also impacted by lifestyle factors. So things that help boost your own production of growth hormone, like getting enough sleep and intermittent fasting, are really helpful.
[00:23:41.630] – Dr.Spar You produce most of it at night when you sleep. So if you eat a lot of food close to bed, you're going to blunt your production growth hormone. If you don't get enough sleep, you're going to blunt your production of growth hormone. So anything you do first has to be on this foundation of watching, not eating a lot. Ideally, then you might intermittent fasting and making sure you're getting enough sleep and managing stress because all that impacts it. But even with all that, some guys get frustrated that not doing the same workout I've been doing, but now I'm making less gains or I'm losing muscle mass and they get testosterone checked and that's fine.
[00:24:12.730] – Dr.Spar So then they think about growth hormone. The problem is, I've never really advocated using growth hormone itself because I kind of said at the beginning of the show, it's not very elegant to just take over of growth hormone and give your body a big boost of it, because the way it works is in this pulsatile fashion, it works best when it's produced a lot at night. And then that's when your body's, say, recovering from a workout and responding to that workout by building up bigger muscle cells and building up muscle and hypertrophy in the muscle. That's how you get bigger muscle.
[00:24:42.640] – Dr.Spar And then it goes down as the day goes on during the day and comes up at various times in the day. And you want that normal circadian rhythm of production. If you just give yourself HGH, human growth hormone, it kind of takes over that and it actually then makes the growth hormone work less well over time because the body gets kind of sensitized to it. So that's where peptides are much more elegant because all they do, the peptides that help stimulate growth hormones, own natural production, get their effect by relying on that same natural pulsatile flow.
[00:25:13.120] – Dr.Spar So giving peptides that produce a little more growth hormone from their own body relies on the body's natural production and doesn't make the body get sensitised to it, doesn't destroy that normal circadian rhythm, and also doesn't come with some of the risks that we worry about of constantly adding growth hormone, like a concern about cancer risk or blood sugar being too high. So these are really helpful and safe ways to boost your own body's natural production of growth hormone.
[00:25:40.630] – Allan Yeah, it's the more I read into hormones, the more I actually realize I'm never going to fully understand the endocrine system and how it works, because it's just I mean, of course, there's entire professions, entire doctors that just focus on endocrine. So it makes sense that it's not something I'm going to just pick up from reading a few books and articles.
[00:26:00.940] – Dr.Spar No, you have to go to the doctor for sure. And I'm just going to go in the weeds a little more on the growth hormone. What about some specific so listeners can really know what to ask for. And again, this is all things you do through your medical practitioner. You can certainly do it with us at Vault Health or someone else, but don't do this on your own. But so it does get a little complicated growth hormone. So the way it works is this your body, right, stimulates its own production growth hormone from the pituitary gland.
[00:26:29.470] – Dr.Spar However, the peptides that help release that, if you just take a peptide that is called the growth hormone-releasing hormone that just tells the body make more growth hormone. And the examples of that are like, Sermorelin people might have heard of or Tesamorelin, which is also which is actually a pharmaceutical called Egrifta approved for HIV lipodystrophy and or something called CJC1295, which is the newest generation. Those are great and they actually do help and they can help with decreasing fat and increasing muscle and energy and even cognition.
[00:27:04.510] – Dr.Spar However, the body will naturally see, Oh wait we're stimulating too much growth hormone. We're going to put a brake on that. And the brain will make something called somatostatin, which basically, “statin” is stopping kind of and “somato” is body. So it's like stop this body-building hormone because we don't want a lot of growth hormone all the time. So you so it stops the release of that extra growth hormone that was produced. So you want to also take something that helps overcome a little bit of that somatostatin so that what extra growth hormone was produced actually gets released.
[00:27:37.300] – Dr.Spar So that's another category, these first growth hormone peptides and the main ones called Ipamorelin. And so you couple that with like the CJC1295 so that the CJC1295 coaxes the body, again it's a signaling molecule, make a little more growth hormone when it's appropriate to make growth hormone. And then the Ipamorelin says yeah you somatostatin trying to stop the release that chillout, let's release some of this and it together works really well and helping make sure you produce a little more and you release it at the appropriate time.
[00:28:12.630] – Allan Yeah, and so once you start getting to stacks and things like that, we're trying to fine tune a human genome. We're trying to get some improvement, some optimization out of our aging as we go. But there are side effects. As you mentioned, the one for libido caused some skin darkening. There are some things you have to consider.
[00:28:41.060] – Dr.Spar Yes.
[00:28:41.820] – Allan This isn't a do it yourself at home chemistry experiment.
[00:28:45.180] – Dr.Spar Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, a lot of them, they all have their own because these are really elegant molecules. And so they all have very specific effects, like I said, different from bigger molecules or bigger proteins. They all have an effect on kind of one pathway. They all have different side effects. And so it's really important to talk to your practitioner about this specific peptide that we're talking about. What are the potential side effects?
[00:29:07.830] – Dr.Spar So like some of the growth hormone ones, you can get a little water retention. You can even get a little like numbness or tingling in your arms. And usually if you decrease the dose that goes away. But we used to see that in higher doses, people were using like almost like a carpal tunnel syndrome. For most people, they help with sleep, but for some people, it causes them sleeplessness because it gets some kind of revved up.
[00:29:31.380] – Dr.Spar So that just we usually say, well, use it a couple hours earlier and that can help with that. The ones that also for growth hormone can raise your blood sugar a little bit. So that's something to watch for, not to the point of creating diabetes. But if you already have high blood sugar, it's something to watch for. And then, like I said, the ones for libido, the Bremelanotide can cause a little nausea and a lot of people. But it's a very short acting and it's not to the point of vomiting. It's just like a flushing kind of wave. But it can also cause some swelling as well.
[00:30:00.180] – Dr.Spar So, yeah, they each have their own set of side effects. The big one is, like I said, high blood pressure with bremelanotide to watch for and then the darkening with that. But in general, they're really well tolerated. They're very safe. They're not causing side effects you don't aren't aware of because they're so small and elegant and targeted that they're not causing liver damage and kidney damage that can happen if you start using even some SARMs that aren't so safe, that are synthetic or some growth hormone itself or some of these other bigger, more wide-ranging effect type molecules.
[00:30:34.830] – Allan Dr. Spar, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?
[00:30:42.360] – Dr.Spar Well, so have a really hard time narrowing it down to three. So I might add. But I'll tell you the first one and I did a TEDx talk about this, it sounds really, really woo woo. But it's really the most important is the first tactic to being fit is why do you want to be fit? You know, the first tactic to being healthy is why do you want your health for? Because as soon as there's a donut available, when you had said, I'm not going to eat donuts, unless you're clear why you committed to not having donuts and being more healthy, you're going to eat that donut.
[00:31:14.610] – Dr.Spar You know, you need to really be clear on. I want to be healthier for my kids to be a role model. I want to be a better partner and feel more sexy. For me to feel more sexy, I need to have a little bit better physique or I want to feel stronger so I can beat people on the basketball court, whatever it is.
[00:31:32.040] – Dr.Spar Why is it that you want to be fit and healthy? You need to literally sit down and think about it? It doesn't take that long, but studies show people who have a clear sense of why they're doing so, they are much more likely to do it. So that's number one.
[00:31:44.550] – Dr.Spar The second I would say we hear a lot about diet and exercise and those are important. So I'm not going to include those. Since we all know that, I'd say stress and sleep are the other two and I worked with NBA basketball players is like an integrative medicine consultant. And those are the two biggest issues for them. And these are obviously very high-level fit guys. And they would find what would undermine their fitness was if they weren't managing stress. We talked a lot about apps that you can download, like Headspace or Calm are the ones how manage stress or journaling or doing some kind of meditation or prayer or even something that helps you every day, even if it's five or ten minutes. Tell your body I'm not in fight or flight mode, because if you're trying to be fair, fight or flight motos, your body.
[00:32:26.880] – Dr.Spar Oh, no, no blood to the muscles. We need to we need to be supporting responding and we're going to store up sugar as fat because we're in crisis. So we're not going to be making sure that we're lean. We're making sure that we're just able to respond and not manage our immune system and our digestion. So managing stress is key. And then sleep is a huge issue for guys, especially where they think, oh, yeah, I can get away with five, six hours a night.
[00:32:52.320] – Dr.Spar And really about five percent of the population can deal with less than seven hours a night on average. Ninety-five percent really need seven to nine hours to not tell the body we need to be in crisis mode and we need to store more fat. And you're just not going to be as healthy and you're going to have early cognitive changes. So. I would say identify why you want to be healthier, fit, manage your stress and make sure you're getting good quality sleep.
[00:33:17.930] – Allan Perfect. Love those. Thank you.
[00:33:20.270] – Allan Now you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast/vault and Dr. Spar or one of his fellow doctors there will have a free consult to talk to you about peptides and some of the other opportunities. Do you want to kind of go a little bit into what the call is about and how they work?
[00:33:38.390] – Dr.Spar Sure. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we created Vault Health because we felt there needs to be mental health specialists that are more available. Women have gynecologists, which is great and very needed, but guys haven't had like somebody who gets guys. So a lot of guys don't have anywhere to go when they want to perform better. I want to be more fit. I don't want to just be not broken. They go to the regular doctor and they get an annual physical to make sure they're not broken.
[00:34:02.390] – Dr.Spar But usually that doctor isn't really looking further to how can I perform better? How can I really make sure that I am not feeling my age as much as I do? And that's what we're all about. So we are a national network of men's health specialists that really get guys who are trying to achieve goals that better. We break down performance into physical performance, sexual performance, and cognitive performance because those are the three areas we really see guys wanting help with.
[00:34:28.310] – Dr.Spar And then we find out what is it that you want help with? Let's look and see. Do we need to do any bloodwork to look further or have you already had bloodwork done and then you don't need it? And then is it hormone therapy like testosterone or peptide therapy? Like a lot of the ones we've talked about, we have other ones we didn't even mention that help with brain health or are there other things to help with energy, to help with sexual function, libido?
[00:34:48.380] – Dr.Spar So we really offer a suite of solutions that are personalized to what that guy really wants. But it all starts with that telehealth visit with a men's health specialist.
[00:34:57.770] – Allan All right. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/vault if you want to learn more about Vault Health and if you want to get to the show notes for this episode, they're at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/458.
[00:35:10.850] – Allan Dr. Spar, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:35:15.470] – Dr.Spar Thank you, Allan. It's great. I really appreciate it.
Post Show/Recap
[00:35:23.190] – Allan Rachel, welcome back.
[00:35:24.480] – Rachel Yeah, how are you doing, Allan?
[00:35:26.490] – Allan Good, good. I'm really glad I had that opportunity to have that conversation with Dr. Spar, because, I've always said on here I don't like the term biohacking because most of the biomarkers that you'll hear out there and I'm not going to name names, but the ones that are on that cutting edge, a lot of them are trying this stuff on their own before they really know what it is.
[00:35:50.640] – Allan And we can look back at bodybuilder's and say, OK, you know, they're bodybuilders in the 60s, 70s and 80s and 90s that we're doing all these steroids. And some of them are just fine. One of them became governor of California and had that great acting career. And, you know, they're fine and did well into their 70s. Others weren't so fine. Some of them had heart attacks. Some of them had roid rage issues.
[00:36:13.800] – Allan There's a whole variety of issues. And until enough of this stuff happens, until it's gone on and enough people have been engaged using these things, we really don't know how someone's going to be effected. That's how clinical trials work, is that they start out with a few people and then they add a few more people and then see that it's working. And then they put a whole bunch of people through. And when I say a whole bunch, we're talking tens of thousands.
[00:36:38.520] – Allan And then from that they start gathering information. Is this safe? Will this kill you? And then that's where you get that whole legal mumbo jumbo at the end of an ad for the purple pill or whatever is because this is X number of people had this problem. X number of people committed suicide or had thoughts of suicide. X number of people had that problem. So how you're going to be affected by potential chemical? I think that you're putting your body in this case that happens to be an amino acid.
[00:37:08.550] – Allan So it sounds benign, but steroids seemed kind of benign when they first started using them. And sometimes they're just not. And especially when you start getting into things like growth hormone, because there are things we don't mind growing. We don't mean growing that muscle and bone and those types of things. But there's things we don't want growing like cancer. And I'm not saying that peptides cause cancer or that peptides could promote cancer. I'm just saying that when you go to these places online and you go to order it and you receive it, I'm going to tell you right now they'll tell you it's not for human consumption, it's for testing purposes.
[00:37:49.080] – Allan And for the most part, it should be animal testing. I think we're past the animal testing stage at this point with peptides, because I was hearing about peptides five, six years ago. So there's a lot more known about them now than there was then. But you still want to be working with a medical professional. So rather you're working with Dr. Spar at Vault Health or you find someone else that you want to work with on these. It's important for you to work with the doctor, make sure you're getting these things from a reputable compounding pharmacy and play it safe.
[00:38:20.040] – Allan You know, we all want to get better. But I can tell you, there is no magic pill. These things can help, but there is no magic pill.
[00:38:28.440] – Rachel Isn't that the truth? Yeah. Peptide sound really intriguing. It sounds like another interesting supplement that's worth trying. And as he had mentioned about some already existing that are tailored for improving immune function. That sounds wonderful, but I have to agree that with any supplementation, it's always best to have the supervision of a doctor. And it's not even the known side effects. There's also unknown side effects and you just don't know how you as an individual patient are going to react.
[00:38:59.550] – Rachel So that's why it's best to have a doctor keeping an eye on you as you try something new. But, yeah, be interesting to see how this plays out. Maybe in another couple of years as they get better with the science and use of it.
[00:39:12.570] – Allan Yeah, and that's what's happening right now. You've got doctors in a clinical setting or you've got doctors like with Vault Health that get on the phone with you. They'll do blood tests where they need to do blood tests. They'll listen to what your health history is and other things that you're going through. And then they'll be able to prescribe something that is appropriate to you. You'll then receive it knowing you can trust what you're getting. You can try it.
[00:39:38.190] – Allan But like with everything, you know, somebody will try a medicine and it doesn't work. And so the doctor will say, well, let's change the prescription and try it this way. This is going to be no different than that. You're just basically trying a peptide rather than a medicine. But that's not to say there's not some negative effects to using peptides.
[00:39:58.290] – Rachel Oh, for sure. You know, as as we do get older, these little things crop up and it's you know, you just need to make sure you're not trading one set of problems for another set of problems with the different supplementation peptides or anything else. And again, I still refer to the experts who might know you a little better as a patient and what you can tolerate and in the can they can just keep an eye on. You as you try these things.
[00:40:23.970] – Allan Absolutely. So, Rachel, we are rolling up on the end of the year for Thanksgiving. Actually, I think as we're recording this, I mean, as this is going on, I think we've already had Thanksgiving in Canada. So I apologize, Canada, that we're a little bit late on the gun with your Thanksgiving, but you can save these recipes and use them next year. OK, I have one of my favorite recipes that I want to share.
[00:40:53.490] – Allan It's a cranberry sauce, but I'm going to let you go ahead and go first, Rachel.
[00:40:57.480] – Rachel Well, I like to have biscuits with my Thanksgiving dinner, which is strange for a Keto person, but I have a new recipe that we just tried recently. Mike bought an airfryer, so we're new to the whole air fryer implements and Keto Connect has an air fryer biscuit recipe that is based with almond flour and cheddar cheese and sour cream. And it was really easy to put together and really easy to use in an airfryer. But if you don't have an airfryer, I've got another recipe that is based with mostly cheese and a little bit of almond flour.
[00:41:39.690] – Rachel It includes cheddar cheese, mozzarella, parmesan and sour cream. And with a little bit of almond flour in that one, I baked in some muffin tins and they came out great. Even my family, who are not keto, really enjoy these biscuits as well. So I'll send you these recipes so that you can post them in your show notes.
[00:42:00.450] – Allan Awesome. Thank you. All right. So on cranberry sauce, to me, Thanksgiving isn't Thanksgiving without a turkey and without cranberry sauce, I can do without the stuffing. I can even do without the mashed potatoes or cauliflower mash as we did last week or even without the biscuits. But I want the cranberry sauce and I want the turkey. They just hand in glove. I can't help but combination.
[00:42:26.040] – Allan And so here's my basic thing, OK, cranberry sauce has everybody can have it kind of a different feel for how they want their cranberry sauce. You can buy the cranberry sauce that's mostly berries and very little gelatin, and you can buy some that are just about practically just gelatin. OK, so you're going to want to play with this a little bit to get it to the texture that you want. So I'm going to talk in my terms of the texture I like, which is more of the whole berries, more berries. OK, you basically want to buy a bag of the cranberries, they sell a 12 ounce bag.
[00:42:59.010] – Allan It's pretty easy. Just rinse them off, put them in, get a saucepan going off of a water about a cup of water, and then you're going to want to put about put a packet of gelatin in there. So if you like a little bit of gelatin, you can make it a little gelatin. And so up to a packet, OK, with no more than that, get the water boiling and then drop the berries in there. Now, the berries will go anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes at ten minutes is about the time they start to pop. And that's what you want. You want the berries popped. For me, by the time they get to fifteen, it's mush. So now we're just doing the jelly kind. So I'm going to be erring on the side of ten minutes. It's in there boiling and I'm stirring. And then, you know, there you go. Once I get it just about toward a point. So the cranberries are just popping for me. For you. If you want it more gelatin, you may put you may let it go a little bit longer.
[00:43:56.130] – Allan But when you got about maybe just I would say a minute left, you drop the chia seeds in there, OK? And that's about a quarter of a cup of seeds now at the Chia Seeds do is they just give it kind of a little bit of a different texture, OK, and then when I start doing is I take it off the heat and I start stirring in confectioner's Swerve. OK, so this is an artificial sweetener. Realize, you know, sometimes you want something, you're not going to want the cranberry sauce without the sweet to back it up.
[00:44:26.040] – Allan It's not just telling you. Right. So you start putting in this Swerve. Now I try to stay closer to like half a cup, but you can go up to as much as three quarters of a cup with the confectioner's Swerve. OK, so you just stir that in and I'll stir in a little bit and then I'll taste it and then I'm OK. This is good for me and now I need to get a little sweeter because everybody else will want to eat it. And then you start on in there. Now, by the time you do all this, the gelatin is going to start to be mixed in.
[00:44:55.470] – Dr.Spar You know, the gelatins in there, the water is in there. Your cranberries are all set. You've got the chia seeds in there. There's one other option that I'll add. And it really depends on what else we have with dinner. But some people like walnuts, crushed walnuts in there. And so you if you want, you can add walnuts to get the additional texture that you want, put it in a glass bowl and set it in the refrigerator.
[00:45:22.010] – Allan For about an hour and then it should set and there you go, you've got cranberry sauce and depending again, if you add that the nuts in there, you could have as much as eight servings. But without the nuts, it's probably going to work out to around six.
[00:45:36.500] – Rachel That sounds wonderful. I have to give that a try for sure.
[00:45:39.170] – Allan Yeah, it's something and it's one of those things, like with most recipes, I do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and then you just fill it out. So I don't really have exact measurements for a lot of these things and I apologize for that. I'm not really a recipe writer. I'm a sit down at the stove and just play and then but, you know, having done some of these things over and over and over again, I have a general good idea about how much of stuff to put in it.
[00:46:03.860] – Allan But just play with it if you like it, a little bit more gelatin to put more gelatin in it and let the berries go longer. If you want a little bit more berry and maybe a little less gelatin and don't cook the berries as long but the chia seeds going in there and then just enough sweetener. And then of course, if you love walnuts like I do, then you put the walnuts in there, a good, healthy, fat kind of round this whole thing out.
[00:46:31.070] – Rachel Perfect.
[00:46:31.820] – Allan All right. So anything else we need to go over, Rachel, before we call it a day?
[00:46:37.430] – Rachel No, I'm good for today.
[00:46:39.410] – Allan All right. Well, Rachel, I'll see you next week.
[00:46:41.930] – Rachel Yep, I know.
Patreons
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When men become proactive with their health, they become what Dr. Tracy Gapin calls Male 2.0. On this episode we discuss his book Male 2.0 and learn more about endocrine disruptors and peptides.
Transcript
Let's Say Hello
[00:02:18.690] – Allan Ras, how are you doing?
[00:02:20.560] – Rachel Good, Allan. How are you today?
[00:02:22.800] – Allan Doing a little better. They finally gave us our Saturdays back and they changed their mind and said the islands could have their Saturdays. And everybody is speculating that they were afraid if we got more days available to us than other people, that those people would just travel here to spend their weekends.
[00:02:41.890] – Allan And they don't really want people doing that. But they they did decide to give us the weekend back, which was really nice because I was able to go in and get a good long walk in, see parts of the island I haven't seen yet because I just haven't been up that way that far. But I found my limit, you know, I found my spot. I was not going be able to probably go much further than that because four hours and five minutes on your feet as well.
[00:03:06.350] – Rachel That's a long day. Yeah, for sure. So but I enjoyed it.
[00:03:10.180] – Allan I enjoyed getting out and got a lot of sunshine and a beautiful day in the jungle. And the cows, most cows got free and we're walking down the road looking around. Yeah. So it's interesting all around. So what are you been up to.
[00:03:26.230] – Rachel Probably the same thing actually over the weekend. I did two long runs. I told you I was going to get back to double digits and I did. And I did some long runs over the weekend. So today is kind of a rest day.
[00:03:37.970] – Allan Good rest days are good. I'd say it's kind of a rest day for me to had a lot going on. I just didn't really have time to put in a good. It's weird. I don't like getting out walking if I can't do two hours.
[00:03:50.680] – Rachel I understand that. I do understand that.
[00:03:53.380] – Allan If I can't get to a part of the island, it's just gorgeous. Then it's like, you know, it's just not as much it's not as much fun. So and it doesn't it's not that it takes me two hours. It's just once I get to about the 45 minute part, 45 to 50 minutes, that's when I start getting the prettier beaches. And so, you know, just that point, I don't really want to turn around, but I, I do sometimes.
[00:04:18.250] – Allan But, you know, because I know once I get that next mile in the just the beaches are just that much prettier. So it's really hard for me to to pull it back in but rest day to day and I'll hit it tomorrow.
[00:04:30.360] – Rachel Awesome. Sounds great.
[00:04:31.840] – Allan All right. So let's introduce our guest.
Interview
[00:04:35.080] – Allan Our guest today is a world renowned men's health and performance expert, professional speaker, entrepreneur and author. He has over 20 years of experience focused on providing Fortune 500 executives, business leaders, entrepreneurs and athletes, a personalized path to optimizing their health and performance. With no further ado, here's Dr. Tracy Gapin.
[00:04:57.120] – Allan Dr. Gapin, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:04:59.890] – Dr. Gapin Hey, Allan, thanks so much for having me today.
[00:05:02.830] – Allan The name of your book is Male 2.0: Cracking the Code to Limitless Health and Vitality. And, I think everybody aspires to be a better version of themselves, but we don't always have the tools or the know how to get there. And I guess as you wrote this book, and it's something that's been kind of top of mind for me, is that you just at the very beginning of the book, kind of just grab us by the collar and say, dammit, grow up, man.
[00:05:30.550] – Allan You know, talking about covid-19 and all the things that we're going through right now, now, more than ever, men have to start paying attention to their health.
[00:05:39.880] – Dr. Gapin Sure. Yeah. You know that I use the term Male 2.0 as really a contrast to what men have done up until now. And that is now 1.0. And you and I spoke briefly before we started about how men don't typically go to the doctor until there's something wrong or their wife is nagging them or there's an acute problem, like they have a disease, a kidney stone, a cancer, or something. Or more commonly when they start to have some issues with their sexual function, sexual health concerns.
[00:06:13.390] – Dr. Gapin And so what male 2.0 is all about is really shifting the mindset of men to focus on proactively optimizing their health before disease sets in. And we could talk about how we do that in a moment. But the key is to understand that guys need to take control, take charge, own their health, and do something about it in a proactive way before it's too late. And that's what Male 1.0 is waiting until disease sets in. Now, 2.0 is being proactive and taking charge.
[00:06:49.000] – Allan Yeah, because our current health care system is designed for sick care. It's not really designed for health care. But, that's when one of the cool things that I've noticed that's changed in the last product, the last ten years is there's a higher emphasis on well care. There's thee's more opportunities than ever for a man to go in and talk to a doctor and start doing protocols that are going to get them healthier.
[00:07:14.140] – Dr. Gapin Sure. Exactly. And, we could talk. We can call that. Preventive medicine, we can call it functional medicine, we can call it personalized precision medicine, but it's really about optimizing yourself and optimizing your whole human system. Men think that all they need is testosterone because that's what's kind of drilled into your head from all these T clinics that are on every corner now. And the key is to understand that if we're going to optimize our health and have amazing energy and feel confident how we look and feel, you have to go well beyond testosterone and focus on stress, which is a big issue right now with covid, especially,
[00:07:57.250] Sleep quality of sleep. Almost every man I see has struggles with poor quality and or quantity of sleep nutrition. What should you eat and when should you be eating it? Looking at our detox and our body's ability to clear toxins, our environment, our fitness, our mindset is a big part as well. You an I spoke briefly before about, you know, limiting beliefs. And and so it's putting all these pieces together into what we call a systems based approach or call it a comprehensive approach, or it's really looking at the whole human system as a complex network of different parts.
[00:08:33.560] – Dr. Gapin And you have to focus on all of it or else you're wasting your time.
[00:08:37.820] – Allan I think that's that's the unfortunately the approach I think a lot of us will take. You know, well, we go out there and say, OK, well, I need to I need to exercise. So we go out and we get some shoes on and we get out and we start doing the jogging and we just don't see the change. The knees hurt the ankles hurt them all hot and sweaty. Now I take a shower and I can feel good about that, but I didn't really change my health significantly.
[00:09:02.090] – Allan And so it almost seems a little too hard. And then I was you had it in the book and I actually saw it on on one of the YouTube channels that you had a speech on that that you were just talking about how low T has just become this epidemic thing men are dealing with. So, obviously, if they know that, that's probably the problem, fatigue, you're lethargic, you don't have any energy.
[00:09:27.890] – Allan Things aren't working the way they're supposed to be working. You're not sleeping. You're not gaining muscle. You're losing muscle. You're putting on body fat, all those things. We know that testosterone helps us not have a problem. I was just shocked when you can say that free testosterone, a male now at a given age, has 45% less testosterone than we did 15 years ago. That's crazy. We're becoming women.
[00:09:57.030] – Dr. Gapin Yeah, you're exactly right. And we could talk about the causes of it. But make no mistake about it, the testosterone levels in men are plummeting. Free testosterone, which is the bioavailable form of it, is even worse. And that's causing all the I shouldn't say necessarily causing it. It's a big part of all the health issues that men are experiencing now. And the mistake is what you just mentioned is to think that, well, if I just go get a testosterone shot, that solves the problem.
[00:10:26.900] – Dr. Gapin And I can't tell you how many men and I see on a daily basis who come in and they're getting testosterone shots from the place down the street. Forty five bucks every two weeks getting the shot. And I still feel like crap. And I'll be like, well, what are you doing for your sleep and your stress? And you know what? You should be eating based on your genetics and. Well, the answer is no, no, no, no.
[00:10:47.720] – Dr. Gapin And and so it's understanding that that as massive a problem as low testosterone has become, if we don't address the underlying causes of it and the other cofounding variables as well, then you're not going to get the success that you're looking for
[00:11:05.090] – Allan That kind of leads me to you had the four components of male 2.0. Could you kind of go through those? Because I think it's really important to understand that this is like we've been talking about. It's not just one things. There's not a magic pill or a magic shot to solve this problem for us. But there's a holistic approach that we really have to consider.
[00:11:26.910] – Dr. Gapin Exactly. Yeah. So over the last twenty years, really, I have formulated this process that I use, that I've now coined the male method as my approach to help men focus on the key pieces of optimization that they need. And so M is mindset, A is aging, L is lifestyle, and E is environment.
[00:11:50.990] – Dr. Gapin So M looking at mindset. I focus first and foremost on your why. Your why is what drives you, what gets you up in the morning, what keeps you up at night, what is your motivation. You're never going to turn things around and get optimized because your wife is nagging you because just because you want to lose ten pounds just for the hell of it. No. My why for example. Is my kids, those beautiful little kids of mine are my everything, and everything I do is to create a better life for them, and that drives me every day more than anything else, more than than any other superficial details. So the key is with mindset. Focus on your what is your why? And don't ever lose sight of that. Don't ever let that go.
[00:12:45.250] – Dr. Gapin Number two is eliminating limiting beliefs. We talk a lot about how guys think that they can't change, that they're too old to change or they'll never lose weight or they'll never have the energy they have when they're 20 years old. Those are all just lame limiting beliefs that we need to overcome. On mindset l also focus on stress mitigation, understanding stress and accepting stress and being able to to put it in it place, put it aside, and move on with your life and not let it let it affect you at a physiologic basis.
[00:13:18.090] – Dr. Gapin So I focus on mindset, techniques, breathing techniques, mindfulness practices like meditation to help with mindset
[00:13:26.220] – Dr. Gapin A is addressing the challenges of aging.This is where I really focus on hormones. Testosterone is just one piece of the the whole picture. You have to look at thyroid and cortisol and estrogen and DHEA, melatonin. The list goes on. There's about eight or nine different hormones that I focus on and all those are associated with the root cause of aging. We look at glucose regulation. We know that that long term blood sugar regulation, insulin sensitivity is the medical term for it has been correlated with obesity and mortality as well. So regulating those sorts of things.
[00:14:04.590] – Dr. Gapin L lifestyle, this is where we focus on the basics of nutrition and fitness and sleep. And there are, of course, generic recommendations like nutrition. I really emphasize the benefits of intermittent fasting or time or restrict feeding, but there's also genetics. We can talk a lot about your epigenetics, how by understanding your genetic blueprint, we can really dial in on exactly what you should be doing, Allan, which may be different than the guy next to you and then the guy next to him. And so it is really personalizing it with genetics can take this to the next level as well. And then finally E is exposures. Endocrine disruptors are chemicals and toxins in our environment which are crushing our health, causing obesity, autoimmune disease, crushing our hormones. And so mitigating exposure to these toxins, as well as improving our body's ability to handle them is the E of of environment.
[00:15:03.410] – Dr. Gapin So that's the Male Method.fifty-sevenOK, and I think one of the core of that, yes, it's a very holistic thing. And one of the areas I want to dive into is the limiting beliefs, because I think many of us still sit there and we'll say, well, my my father my father was obese and then he had a heart attack when he was fifty seven. My mother was obese. And then this happened, which is not actually true.
[00:15:26.150] – Allan I'm just saying. And someone said, but we feel like we're on a track, we're on a train track and we're going at the same speed that our parents went and we're going to the same destination. And while it is true we're going to the same destination eventually, If we believe we're going there faster, we are. I think it was. Was it Ford that said, I really believe you can or you can't? You're right. Can you talk about these limiting beliefs and some things that we can do as a practice to kind of get past them?
[00:16:01.880] – Dr. Gapin Absolutely. And so living beliefs are exactly what you said. They are ingrained beliefsthat really formed the basis of your of your behavior and your emotions.
[00:16:15.320] – Dr. Gapin And these beliefs arewrong. So one of them, you brought up the concept of genetics and how if my parents died young from heart disease or my mom had breast cancer, that means I'm going to get as well and I'm destined to to die early. And and from that perspective, that's just epigenetics where we know that your genes are not your destiny. And we now understand the concept of epigenetics, which means that our actions, our lifestyle, our behaviors and what we do, how we eat, how we move, even how we breathe and how we think it's amazing affects the expression of our genes.
[00:16:53.810] – Dr. Gapin And so people talk about the BRCA1 gene, for example. Did you know that that lifestyle has a massive impact on whether that brak a gene is going to cause a woman to have breast cancer or not? It's not just the gene alone. You need the lifestyle and the environmental factors as well. And so it's understanding that that's a limiting belief that just because your parents were ill or died early, that you will as well.
[00:17:19.200] – Dr. Gapin But a lot of it also is really just psychological, you know. We in general tend to think negatively, think the worst, have limiting thoughts of our capabilities and what we're able to achieve. And we need to get beyond that. We need to understand the limitless potential is the phrase that I like to really emphasize that we all have. We all have a limitless potential, if you will, recognize it and pursue it. And I can show you men who are in their 80s who are incredibly healthy, who decades ago were on death's door and they made a decision. It's called Living with intention, I call it where you live with specific intention, laser focus on your goals and you don't ever lose sight of that. And so a lot of that is psychological understanding that these negative thoughts are nothing more than negative thoughts and that you can overcome that it comes down to the power of positivity and living with intention. And again, what's the underlying foundation for all that? What is your why?
[00:18:27.370] – Allan Yes. When I when I got into all this and I was I was on the wrong path and my wife was that I was I was not going to be a part of my daughter's life as long as I needed to be. I want to be around to help her. And so I know she was getting into things that reminded me of who I was when I was her age. You know, she was doing the the cross fit and the obstacle course races.
[00:18:53.060] – Allan And I was like, you know, I really want to go there with her. I want to be a part of that. She wants me to go watch. And I'm like, no, I'm not going to be a spectator in your life. I'm going to be a participanttwenty-five. And that was the spark I needed to get in the gym to start moving more, to start learning how to eat, to start working on my sleep and my stress and build the body that could do a Tough Mudder with my daughter, who was twenty-five years younger than me.
[00:19:21.050] – Allan And the other thing was, I didn't want her dragging me behind or slowing down. I wanted to be there with her the whole way. And the joy of that, that was the reward. You know, there's not a food reward or anything. I threw at myself afterwards saying, oh, well, now I can go off of this. It was this. I just got the best gift of finishing this Tough Mudder with my daughter. And when you have that kind of passion behind what you're doing, you said you can overcome anything.
[00:19:47.750] – Allan You know, we ran through electricity. They're shocking us with electricity as we were trying to finish this race and people were faced planning left and right. And we just ran straight through it because I was just so pumped about that moment with my daughter. So, yeah, I agree. If you believe it'll happen and you have if you've got that, why build behind it been by absolute sureness. You'll get where you want to go. Yeah.
[00:20:13.550] – Dr. Gapin What a great story. That's a perfect example. And I love that of how that drives you to achieve something that you would never, ever achieve. If you're doing it just for the sake of doing it or because someone is telling you to do it or something that doesn't have emotion behind it. You know, I see guys every day who say, I want to lose ten or fifteen pounds. Why would I just want to have a smaller waist size or I want to have smaller.
[00:20:39.440] – Dr. Gapin That's not what the why is the emotional driving force behind it for you? It's that amazing experience with your daughter that you can't put a price on that. It's incredible. For me, it's my kids, same thing. For a lot of guys is to actually feel loved by their partner and they want to feel attractive to their partner. And that provides them fulfillment and an emotion that's very important to them. That's what's going to drive them. It's not the I want to lose ten pounds. It's the emotional underpinning that we need to focus on.
[00:21:14.480] – Allan Yes. And, you know, one of the interesting things I just had Amanda Thebe on last week and we were talking about menopause. And one of the things that she brought up was that when a woman's estrogen starts going out of whack at menopause, then they also the oxytocin goes down and that's the love and bonding. And so in many cases, we're getting to this midlife point. Our testosterone is crap, their estrogen is crap, and now there's a conflict between us.
[00:21:43.130] – Allan And we don't have that the bonds sometimes to make it through there. So, you know, I can I can definitely see a situation where you're saying what's happening to me and what's happening to my wife is not working. And I do want to feel that love again. I do want to have that, that. And a lot of that's going to come from what you can control, which is yourself.
[00:22:02.490] – Dr. Gapin Absolutely. Yeah, I completely agree.
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[00:24:12.860] – Allan Now, we talked about endocrine disruptors and I've gotten into this before, you know, I remember at work there's a guy who would come in every day and he would he would have a little plastic container with his lunch and he would put it in the microwave, but he would microwave his lunch. And I wanted to say something, but I just didn't feel like it was my place there just to say something to this guy. And so I started trying to avoid BPA.
[00:24:36.230] – Allan I started saying I'm not going to get bisphenol A. I'm not going to use that. And then now I'm reading when they switched to Bisphenol S we don't know if that's any better, any worse. It's just it's different sources that can say it's a BPA free thing.
[00:24:50.480] – Allan And then there's phthalates and astrazine and birth control and phytoestrogen. And then you're whole talk about cows and the myriad of reasons why cows milk could be a problem or is a problem. I'm just fascinated hat stuff's out there and took me like atrazine. You were saying it could affect male frogs. Could you could you go through that story?
[00:25:16.120] – Dr. Gapin Because it's pretty dramatic. Yes. So for your listeners, atrazine is an herbicide that's used to kill weeds, basically, and it's sprayed on crops here in the US. It's been actually been banned in Europe, but for some reason, it's still allowed here in the US. Thank you, FDA.
[00:25:34.680] – Dr. Gapin And it's the second most commonly used herbicide behind glyphosate. So people focus on just glyphosate, but atrazine causes similar issues and it's sprayed mostly on our corn crops and our wheat crops here in the US. So and especially if something is nonorganic then is likely been sprayed with atrazine and that will never show up in the ingredient list of your products. So you don't know what's there, but it's definitely there. We have found that atrazine is found in significant levels of our drinking water and the water tables are contaminated with atrazine because our community, our municipal treatment plants are very poor at filtering out endocrine disruptors such as atrazine and estradol, birth control, and all these other toxins.
[00:26:19.550] – Dr. Gapin So atrazine, you mentioned the frog story is pretty scary at very minuscule levels of atrazine. Male frogs become female frogs. If they're exposed to atrazine in very small concentrations in the water, they become female and actually lay eggs. So it's amazing to think about these male frogs actually become female and they're actually able to actually lay eggs and reproduce, which is insane. The drinking water here in the US has exponentially higher levels of atrazine than those studies in the frogs.
[00:26:56.010] – Dr. Gapin And so we know that atrazine causes autoimmune issues. It has been linked with a decrease in testosterone levels. Without question, it's been linked with cancers and obesity and diabetes, and it's unfortunately not really discussed very much.
[00:27:12.960] – Allan I think the worst of it is that we all have it. Every single every single one of us is exposed to these on a daily basis. It's in our water, as you mentioned. It's in containers that we're putting our food in. It's in products that we're using to wash our hair or shave our face or wash our clothes, keep the static out, make our stuff soft and smell good. All of these are really messing with the way our bodies hormones work.
[00:27:44.490] – Allan So what are some strategies for us to implement where we can at least do something about this? Because it's not going to change, we can't count on the FDA to come around and fix this for us in the short run. And so we have to be proactive. What are some things we can do?
[00:28:00.360] – Dr. Gapin Yeah, great question. So we can look at it from two different angles. First, we can look at it from mitigating or eliminating it possible our exposure to these toxins. And then we can look at it from a functional perspective of how do we optimize our bodies, detox pathways to fight off the exposures that we do encounter.
[00:28:23.120] – Dr. Gapin So from the mitigating exposure part, first, it's from a food standpoint focusing on limiting exposure in our foods. That means eating organic. That means eating grass-fed beef if you are meat eater. That means focusing on almond milk, cashew nut milk, rather than cow milk, because we know all cow milk. You mentioned that cow milk. These cows are eating the crops, normal milk on the shelf. These cows are eating the crops that are laden with atrazine and phytoestrogens and other chemicals. The cows are given steroids hormones themselves, and then the milk, once harvested, is stored in plastic containers and the plastic is getting leached into the milk, the phthalates and the BPA.
[00:29:13.050] – Dr. Gapin And it's this soup, if you will, of endocrine disruption in that milk. So, limiting exposure in your food by focusing on organic fresh fruits and vegetables, grass-fed animal meat. Looking at drinking water, one of the biggest culprits is plastic water bottles. And so I focus on right here. I know your listeners can't see, but I'm holding a stainless steel water bottle so that every time I drink water, I have this with me and I drink from this rather than ever using a plastic water bottle.
[00:29:45.390] – Dr. Gapin Another big one is coffee. I'm a coffee addict like a lot of people and cups, you know, plastic when it gets hot, releases these chemicals into your food and drink. So I would avoid cups. For example, I would avoid store your plastic or your food in any plastic containers, especially the story you mentioned of heating up food in the microwave and any kind of plastic container as well. It tends to be more when these plastics are hot, when they tend to leach the chemicals.
[00:30:16.980] – Dr. Gapin And then you mentioned personal care products like shampoo and soap and laundry detergent and sunscreen and deodorant. You want to really look at the ingredients and choose carefully. There are I like to recommend a couple apps on your phone that you can use to actually scan barcodes and find out the actual ingredients of your products before you buy them. Because a lot of those personal care products you are putting on yourself and these chemicals they can absorb through your skin very easily.
[00:30:47.640] – Dr. Gapin It's called lipophilic, which means they like to get absorbed through the fatty layer of your skin. And so you want to really do everything you can to mitigate exposure. We find it in plastic products, baby toys, plastic containers, chemicals, paint and hoses and garden. Everywhere.
[00:31:13.980] – Dr. Gapin Yeah, what's amazing is I've tubing has high levels of phthalates in an I.V. tubing. You go to the hospital and you're getting IV fluids and you're actually getting these chemicals in. It's it's insane that they're everywhere.
[00:31:29.230] – Dr. Gapin So then the other side of it is really optimizing your detox system and your body has a free radical scavenger system or an antioxidant system where your body is able to kind of detoxify these chemicals. And so we look at things like glutathion and catalase. And thyrotoxin and all these other complex pathways that start in your liver to clear these toxins. And so anything we can do to optimize, that's going to be valuable. What do you what can you do to optimize that? We can look at cold therapy, cryotherapy like cold showers, look at intermittent fasting. We can look at supplements like curcumin or tumeric, supplements like protandem, which is amazing, has Nrf2 activator. And we can look at supplementing with NAD boosters. NAD is a molecule that is very much needed to improve our redox system, redox pathways to help clear these toxins.
[00:32:32.010] – Dr. Gapin And so making sure that your body has an ample supply and so supplemented with MNN, for example, or NAD patches are great way of doing that as well. And then finally, I'll briefly mention that what I do with my clients is I look at their genetics and based on your genetic blueprint, we can really understand your body's function and your weak spots or your blind spots of what we need to optimize. So for some people, it may be that there are glutathione is susceptible or maybe they don't have good mitochondrial function or whatever it may be. And we can specifically target that area for optimization to improve your body's detox pathways.
[00:33:15.140] – Allan And there's one I didn't want I didn't want to go on without reminding them you brought this up. Neither one of us are spokespeople for this company, but you filter your water specifically using charcoal filters to try to get these these endocrine disruptors out of our water.
[00:33:32.810] – Dr. Gapin Sure. It's actually it's a carbon filter, you're right, its a carbon block filter. And there are a couple of different ways of doing that. I have in the past used a Berkey water filter and an nonaffiliated I have no financial involvement with them at all, but I love their product.
[00:33:48.530] – Dr. Gapin It looks like a tea urn and you can take lake water and put it in this and it'll filter out all the toxins and chemicals and purify it to the point that you can drink it safely. They also are there also is an underwater mount for your sink that you can use that has again, you want a carbon block filter that will clear out these endocrine disruptors. Not reverse osmosis. I actually don't recommend RO typically because it does filter out some minerals that you actually need, like calcium, for example, you filter out too much of the good stuff with RO and you waste a ton of water as well.
[00:34:26.780] – Dr. Gapin But there is an undercounter mound that you can use for carbon filter. And then there's also a Kinetico has a good one that we're actually building a house. I'm going to be putting it in that house as a Kinetico, a home system that will filter your entire house water again with a carbon block filter to purify it.
[00:34:45.500] – Allan Cool. Yeah, we live on an island and a lot of people here are they basically have to get their own water from rainwater and we're told not to drink the city water and stuff like that. So we do some of that. And so, yeah, water filters are pretty ubiquitous here on the islands because you when you're dealing with rainwater and trying to drink that or even the city water, in some cases you just want to be careful.
[00:35:08.900] – Dr. Gapin Sure, sure.
[00:35:10.250] – Allan Now, I really haven't talked about peptides on this show. It's kind of something that I think is it's starting to go a little bit more mainstream. When I first started hearing about you and I think the term they used was SARMS. And so I started doing a little bit of reading on them there. But I'm not someone who typically brings the type of stuff that's going to move you two percent. If you're not focused on your mindset and your lifestyle and your environment, then the peptides aren't going to get you there.
[00:35:39.050] – Allan That's not the secret sauce. Yeah, but they're very, very interesting because they're just amino acid chains, but they have some pretty significant effects on our body. If, again, if we're doing everything else right, peptides might be something to explore. Could you talk about peptides, what they are and what they do?
[00:35:56.110] – Dr. Gapin Sure. Yeah, peptides are absolutely amazing. And I truly believe that at some point peptides will replace pharmaceuticals. And I know that's a bold statement, but it's true because they have amazing capabilities to provide very precise, specific outcomes with very minimal, if any, downside or side effects.
[00:36:18.290] – Dr. Gapin So peptides, as you mentioned, are simply chains of amino acids. A protein is just a long chain of amino acids. That's all it is. A peptide is a short protein. Anything under 50 amino acids long is considered a peptide and anything between fifty and a hundred is a polypeptide and over one hundred amino acids and length is called a protein. It's that simple. So peptides can provide amazing specific functions, such as we can use peptides to help with metabolism, burning fat, losing weight.
[00:36:51.500] – Dr. Gapin We can use peptide for building muscle. We use peptides to sleep through peptides for improved cognitive function, focus and memory and anxiety. There are peptides for improving gut health or musculoskeletal repair or reducing systemic inflammation. There are amazing peptides for men's health, specifically libido and boosting testosterone and actually erectile dysfunction. There are a few peptides that men have actually complained that the erection last too long from the peptide. So they may have taken too much on their peptides for hair loss and for skin rejuvenation.
[00:37:31.310] – Dr. Gapin And it goes on and on and on. And so so what's amazing about peptides is that you can have very specific functions and again, very little, if any, downside. You know, the first peptide ever discovered was actually insulin. Insulin is a peptide and growth hormone peptide. So these are naturally occurring, signaling molecules in the body that give signals that your body already recognizes. So that's what makes these very unique and different from pharmaceuticals, is that these are natural products that are recognized by your body to provide specific outcomes.
[00:38:08.390] – Dr. Gapin Some peptides are given orally and some peptides are given via subcutaneous injection. Some peptides are given intranasally, as a nasal spray as well. So you can also inject peptides into a joint. For example, BPC is a great peptide that's amazing for reducing inflammation either in the gut or in your joints.
[00:38:33.560] – Dr. Gapin And BPC can be given orally, which is amazing for gut health. Or it can be given subcutaneously for systemic inflammation or specifically into a joint to help reduce inflammation in the intraarticular space. So that's an example of how depending on the function, you're trying to achieve different routes of administration.
[00:38:54.950] – Allan OK, now if I eat a grass-fed, grass-finished steak, it's a protein. My body is going to break that protein down to usable amino acids. What's preventing the oral peptides from being broken down in a similar fashion?
[00:39:10.950] – Dr. Gapin Yeah, great question, and that's the reason most peptides are not oral. BPC is a great one and BPC is very helpful to be taken specifically orally if you're trying to improve the gut, because that's where it's going to get absorbed and have its function is specifically in the gut and affect the microbiome.
[00:39:31.020] – Dr. Gapin I've had guys who have come in with significant reflux symptoms, irritable bowel symptoms and chronic gastrointestinal bloating and pain. And among other things, I add BPC and a month or two later they forgot they even had any symptoms at all. It's pretty impressive. So you're exactly right that in general, most peptides need to be given either subcutaneously or intranasal or somehow get systemic other than the gut, because the gut will break those down and they're too big to be absorbed the way they are.
[00:40:07.800] – Dr. Gapin And I'll also emphasize briefly, I love what you said. That is, once you do everything else, peptides are great. A lot of guys will come to me for peptides first. And my analogy here is peptides are dessert until you eat your dinner. You don't get peptides until you do the heavy lifting and do the right things and make sure that the male method is being achieved properly, then peptides are not necessarily going to be very helpful.
[00:40:35.910] – Allan Yeah, I think I think the other thing that comes out of this is you can go on onto websites and they're going to they'll sell you peptides. So they'll tell you it's MK677, and this is going to help you gain muscle. And but that's that's not really the route you really want to go with. This is the self somewhat medicating. I don't want to call it a medicine, because when you get it from them, they're saying it's not for human consumption.
[00:41:01.170] – Allan But that's what your intention is. So how do we go about knowing what one I guess knowing what we need or we could use and then getting it appropriate?
[00:41:11.860] – Dr. Gapin Yeah, great. Great point. So as you mentioned, you can find these peptides all over the Internet and the problem with these places, and I'm not going to name any of them to call them out, but they are research chemicals in. You know, when you go to these sites that are offering it to the masses, it's a research chemical. And unless it's coming from a compounding pharmacy that have quality assurance, they have good QA documentation of the purity of their product, the safety of the products. You just don't know what you're getting. I've heard amazing stories of people getting these peptides and then sending them off for analysis and they have nothing like what they're supposed to have and other stuff in there that they shouldn't. And so from a pure standpoint, from a safety standpoint, from a quality assurance perspective, I would never recommend I wouldn't take it myself unless it comes from a qualified compounding pharmacy. And so that's why you need to get your peptides from a physician like myself or another prescriber who has experience with peptides.
[00:42:18.930] – Allan So as we're coming up on November being Male Health Month, we want to make sure we're more aware of it. I have to ask you the same question I ask all my guests. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?
[00:42:38.340] – Dr. Gapin Well, absolutely. Great questions. Number one is sleep. I think that one of the most overlooked aspects of men's health is sleep. And I like to use wearable technology to track every client I work with. They have to wear either an aura ring, a biostrap, a Garmin watch like I have on here some they actually track their data. And what we find is their sleep is awful. And so they may think it's fine when you actually track the quality is terrible.
[00:43:07.800] – Dr. Gapin So I really like to emphasize a couple aspects of sleep hygiene that are very valuable when it comes to basics of sleep optimization.
[00:43:17.140] – Dr. Gapin Number one is consistent sleep schedule. So setting a time that you're going to go to bed, let's say it's ten o'clock, ten thirty and you go to bed that exact same time every single night, eventually your body is going to get into a good circadian rhythm that is going to help improve the quality of your sleep. And your body senses that your circadian rhythm, your clock genes are called and your period changes are genes that regulate your circadian rhythm. They sense this. And so going to the exact same time every day, including the weekends, there's the social jetlag people have where they tend to sleep very poorly during the week and they go, oh, I'll just make it up on the weekend. It just doesn't work like that. Your body does not recover like it needs to by simply adding an extra hour sleep on Saturday and Sunday. So it's really being consistent about sleep schedule, going to bed and waking up at the exact same time
[00:44:09.390] For three hours before you go to bed, you need to turn off every single electron in your house, no more phones, no more computers, no laptops, iPads, that sort of thing, turn off the TV, read a book, use an incandescent light to read a book and focus at that time on meditation is great on some mindfulness techniques before you go to bed as well. But you've got to get the blue light that's coming from these electronic devices off of you for three hours before bedtime.
[00:44:37.740] – Dr. Gapin I would also emphasize that your bedroom should be for two things only.
[00:44:43.890] – Allan Preach it.
[00:44:45.030] – Dr. Gapin And one and one of them is sleep. Yes, a lot of guys will, I hear the story all the time: I just lay in my bed and work on my laptop for a couple hours before bedtime. Worst thing you could do is when you go in bed. It's only for two things.
[00:45:02.860] – Dr. Gapin During the day, your body needs sunlight, you need exposure to sunlight, and so especially early in the morning, as early as you can, you want to get out and get your body exposed to at least 15 to 20 minutes of sunlight, especially in the morning, again, to help with that circadian rhythm.
[00:45:19.110] We can also look at things like keeping your your bedroom completely dark, keeping a cool, comfortable bedding, get rid of any EMF electronics in your bedroom, such as WiFi, cell phones. There are some advocates for actually turning off the circuit breaker for your bedroom because your outlets are actually releasing EMF, even if nothing is plugged into them.
[00:45:41.780] – Dr. Gapin And then the last piece that a lot of people may not have heard about is your diet. So what you're eating at dinner can often have a profound effect on your sleep. So foods that are high in amino acids, foods that have MSG, these foods give you glutamate. Glutamate, an amino acid that is actually an excitatory neurotransmitter, it gets converted in your body to GABA, which is a very relaxing, soothing neurotransmitter. For some people, they can't make that conversion very easily. They have a variant in one of their genes that code for the ability to turn off glutamate. And so for a lot of men, what you're eating at dinner time may actually be affecting the quality of your sleep and the disruption of your sleep. So I recommend that you really try to limit high protein foods and MSG, even grains that may have glutamate in them for four to five hours before bedtime as well.
[00:46:41.820] – Allan Thank you for that, Dr. Gapin. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book, Male 2.0, where would you like for me to send them?
[00:46:51.870] – Dr. Gapin Thanks. Yeah, they can check out my website. It's drtracygapin.com, and I will offer to your listeners a free copy of my book called Male 2.0, and they could check that out on my website at drtracygapin.com/limitless. And again, free copy. Just help with the shipping. Otherwise, the book is free.
[00:47:15.690] – Allan Awesome. Thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness
[00:47:19.320] – Dr. Gapin Hey, I enjoyed being with you here, Allan. Thanks so much.
Post Interview/Recap
[00:47:26.480] – Allan All right, Ras, I know this was kind of a men's health topic, but, you know, there's ways to take information away from all these conversations, whether we're talking about menopause, whether we're talking about some men's health issues. There's always something to take away, if nothing else, than just knowing that your significant other is going through some stuff and things that we can do to make it better for him or her, things we can do to take care of our children, because it's not the amount of chemicals that are going to be available in the world are not going down or going up.
[00:47:58.670] – Allan And so that's one of the things I took out of this was just how serious endocrine disrupters can be. I mean, you're talking a frog from a male to a female. And I'm like eww.
[00:48:11.010] – Rachel That's very serious stuff right there. That was a light bulb moment for me, too.
[00:48:17.810] – Allan I downloaded the Environmental Working Group app. You can find this on iPhone and I'm pretty sure it's on Android. But I downloaded the app just to see what it was like. And it's actually really, really cool. You just take a picture of the barcode, you know, so it opens up like your camera. So it's going to ask to use your camera and then you just put the barcode in that little square.
[00:48:41.600] – Allan And as soon as it reads what it is off that barcode, it tells you everything that's in it. And, you know, you basically can see. And so my wife bought this body wash. She likes the smell of it. It's supposed to have pheromones. I don't know that it's making a difference, but she does like it. So that's that's that. And it's caught in the middle. And I was like, OK, now it's caught a middle because of possible allergies.
[00:49:04.900] – Allan And I'm only really allergic to dumb people and people that lie. I'm not allergic to anything else.
[00:49:11.780] – Allan So, you know, that's got the fragrance that they're using. I'm not allergic to. But, you know, it doesn't have any of those endocrine disruptors, which was good to know. Now, I did have some dyes in it. Of course, they want it to be a pretty color. Doesn't have to be, but it is. And so, there are some dyes in there that I have to think about. You know, there's really something I want to put on my skin or is that something I want on someone else's skin in my family?
[00:49:39.440] – Allan So I thought that was a really cool app to have and just kind of go through and look at your household cleaners, look at the things you're putting on your body. You know, this makeup, all of it. It's just, you know, there's things there that you just might not know which you're getting because a shampoo sounds are, you know, cleaners sound like a very easy thing. Just put some soap and some fragrance and let's go.
[00:50:00.500] – Allan But that's not always the case. They said they want to make it pretty color. They wanted to, you know, have a certain feel and texture to it. So you feel like you're getting something more than just some soap. And so there might be more than just soap in your soap.
[00:50:18.350] – Rachel That's so true. And we don't know about what these chemicals, many of these newer chemicals or compounds do in the long term either. So it's helpful just to get a little heads up to see what's in things, just like with the food we eat every day. You just may not know what chemicals are in all of those detergents and soaps and cleaning products. So that sounds like a really neat app.
[00:50:41.720] – Allan Yeah, I'm glad I did. And also, I'm going to take a few minutes to find that that filter he was talking about, you know, the charcoal filter. It does look like a coffeemaker. You know, one of the things you have in an office space, if you've ever seen office space type of coffee deal where it makes large things of coffee, but go find one of those and I'll put that in the show notes for this episode.
Berkey IMP6X2-BB Imperial Stainless Steel Water Filtration System with 2 Black Filter Elements
[00:51:07.310] – Allan So if you do go to the show notes, there'll be some links there. I don't think I can link to the app, the Environmental Working Group app itself, but it's easy enough to find by doing the search. But I will I will link to that filter so you can filter out some of that stuff that might be in your tap water at home.
[00:51:27.230] – Rachel That's a great idea. He didn't talk about reducing exposure to toxins and that's the first step is knowing what we're exposed to. But he also mentioned that being healthy or having a healthy lifestyle can help improve our options after maybe being exposed to some things. You talked about a lifestyle, how that impacts our genetics. And just because we may be prone to certain things, like he had mentioned the BRCA gene, which is on my radar, if we lived a healthy lifestyle with good food, good nutrition, good exercise, maybe that gene won't be activated.
[00:52:03.890] – Allan Yeah. And then the other side of it is you have to think about these things as far as what's the cumulative thing that's going on with your body. And so if we're throwing chemicals at our body and we're eating crappy food and we're not getting good sleep and we don't have good stress management protocols and we're not moving enough, all of those are basically signals to your body your information, food is information, movement is information, and if you think about it from that perspective, the coding that's there is going to kick off and say, OK, this person doesn't need to be around any longer. Let's go ahead and do these bad things because, you know, they they want it. I mean, not to say you're asking for it, you know, in a sense. So we know that movement. We know that lifestyle. We know that what we eat or sleep, all of it impacts our health. And the more that we can do step by step, just little increments, one, cutting out the toxins Two, looking and getting higher quality food.
[00:53:04.130] – Allan So you're getting the nutrition, reading another just even another study today that showed that vitamin D deficiency is a big, big deal with covid. And so, you know, if you're not getting the requisite sunshine, 15, 20 minutes out in sun with a good bit of your skin exposed. So, you know, you're getting some sun, you're getting some vitamin D. If you can't get it, then consider supplementation. But if you're not getting your vitamin D, you're putting yourself at risk for complications from covid, that would be worse than it would otherwise be.
[00:53:40.280] – Allan So, again, these things are cumulative about our lifestyle and other things you can do today to improve all of it, to give your body a fighting chance. Just little incremental things.
[00:53:51.980] – Rachel Yeah, it all adds up to these little steps really do make a difference in the long run.
[00:53:57.380] – Allan All right. So we challenged ourselves to start helping you come up with a Keto Thanksgiving, hopefully can roll in to maybe even a Keto Christmas by giving you a few recipes. And the recipe I'm going to bring on is not so much a recipe as a as a style of a way of getting something done. The turkey is the hallmark for most people to to have. Now, if you really want to go, Keto, then I'd say go with ham. Ham is going to be more Keto than a turkey.
[00:54:29.270] – Allan But if is the thing which for us, Thanksgiving is definitely for me it's the thing. I love cooking the Thanksgiving turkey. It's a gift I do for the family for Thanksgiving every year. And we're going to do it a little early this year because of covid. We're having to change our travel, but I'm still going to cook a turkey for my family about a week early. But anyway, here's how you do it. It's pretty simple.
[00:54:52.220] – Allan Go find a good quality turkey, you know, get going, get an organic, humanely raised, pastured turkey. You know, just wild out there about their turkey. Better if you can hunt for it. You know, I don't know. I think they have turkeys up there in Michigan.
[00:55:08.530] – Rachel Oh, yeah.
[00:55:09.200] – Allan Maybe Mike can go get you one. I just think hardest thing to hunt, but you get a good quality turkey. OK, that's the first bit.
[00:55:16.880] – Allan Second bit is that I'm going to tell you to cook it the exact opposite way. Everybody else tells you to cook it, OK? You don't want to put it on rack. You want to put it down on the pan and you want to put it breast down. OK, everybody else cooks their turkey breast up, and that's why the breast milk gets really, really dry, because the moisture falls down and it falls out of the breast, which one to do is flip the script on this and cook it for the first bit breast down.
[00:55:47.190] OK, so what I'm going to do with my turkey is I'm going to clean it, wash it off real good upon the giblets out. I'm just going to lay them down in the pan. OK, those are a treat for me about three hours from now. OK, I'm a preheat the oven to 325. So the ovens warming up. I clean the turkey out. Got it ready. Sometimes they stuff the giblets in the next base, in the neck, in the bottom space.
[00:56:11.230] And I don't know why that juxtaposition that's backwards from where it came from. And maybe, you know, if someone knows why they do giblets the way they do, message me, let me know why that happens.
[00:56:22.570] But anyway, you clean out all that stuff, and then I'm basically going to take a complete stick of butter and I'm going to put it in in the cavity. I'm going to take a cup of chicken broth. I put that in the cavity, I'm going to I'm a dice up some celery with dice up some mushrooms and dice up some onions and we'll put that all in the cavity, OK. Close the legs up. They usually don't have some kind of little strap if they don't just use some string and tie the title legs back together at the bottom.
[00:56:56.410] – Allan So that kind of stays closed. Oh I forgot one thing. Oh I've got almost the most important thing. There's two things. OK, I guess I forgot. One is a beer, a dark beer. So get yourself a dark beer. You know, if you can find a dark, dark beer and you pour that in there along with everything else, and then you want to put some spice in there. And what I usually use is I use Tony Chachere's.
[00:57:20.230] – Allan It's a Cajun spice. You can usually find it just about anywhere I've never had trouble finding. And if you can't find that, just get a Cajun spice and you want to put a good bit of Cajun spice in the center. OK, so now all that's in there, it's bubbled around, the spices in there, the beers in there, the butter is in there. And then you just, like I say, close the legs up and you lay it breast down in your baking pan in the pan dip and make sure it's deep because the moisture is going to come out and your breast is literally going to sit in that moisture as it cooks cover it all up with tin foil and put it in the oven.
[00:57:54.350] Now, depending on the size of your turkey. What you want to do is cook the turkey until it has like an internal temperature of about 165, maybe just a little bit more. OK, and that can take anywhere from three to four hours from most of the turkeys that you're going to buy, get it to about 165 internal temperature once it gets to 165 to pull it out and carefully turn the turkey over. I always make a mess doing this, but you turn the turkey over and then you carefully peel all the tinfoil away, carefully turn the turkey over and you put it back in the oven and you let it go for probably about another half hour to 45 minutes.
[00:58:37.970] – Allan So you get an internal temperature of 185. You always want to cook any kind of poultry, chicken or turkey. You want to get it to internal temperature of 165. That's when it's done. I mean, 185. So once you get it to 185, you're done. Pull it out. Now, when I do the turn over, I talked about the giblets. That's when I go fish them out. And I put them on a plate and I put the turkey back in and I go sit watch football and I eat the gibblets.
[00:59:09.300] – Rachel Nice.
[00:59:09.560] Nobody else. Nobody else wants them. I love them. So I sit there and just eat them. And I was like, What are you eating the turkey? Like you started the turkey. Yeah, but not the kind of turkey you want but the kind I want it. And so that's my little treat to myself. And I'm cooking the turkey is to have the giblets while I'm watching it and waiting for that last, you know, half hour to 45 minutes for the turkey to come out.
[00:59:33.800] – Allan And so that's it. What you've done with the with the drippings and all that, you can use it in something else, a gravy or something. But it basically because the turkey cooked almost all the way through with the breast down in that moisture, it retains the moisture and you'll have a very juicy recipe bird. And it was butter and other stuff that was drifting down through there. So it just adds a little bit more fat. Not a lot, because you only put one stick for the whole turkey, but there's just a little bit more fat there than you would have otherwise had.
[01:00:09.050] – Allan So that's that's the turkey.
[01:00:11.910] – Rachel Sounds delicious. It sounds awesome.
[01:00:14.490] – Allan And it because you've cooked it breast down, it might not be as pretty as Martha Stewart, but it's still going to have that golden brown. It's still going to look nice enough. And is to me, it's that's the taste. You're going to slice it needed anyway. So that's that's my recipe for Thanksgiving. How to make your turkey a little bit more Ketofied.
[01:00:36.630] – Rachel Oh, that sounds so good. Well, you can't have turkey without mashed potatoes, am I right?
[01:00:42.940] – Allan Yes.
[01:00:43.870] – Rachel Except for, if you're Keto potatoes are not part of your day to day from normal diet. So I have a creamy mash cauliflower recipe that I got from the ketoconnect.com. Matt and Megha are great cooks and I have tried this recipe several times and I've modified it to different tastes. But yes, you can turn cauliflower into basically a replacement for mashed potatoes. You just boil the cauliflower to get them soft.
[01:01:14.290] – Rachel You drain them, you put them in a food processor and you process them until you get them to the creamier consistency that you like. And then the Keto Connect recipe suggests adding heavy whipping cream, butter, garlic, rosemary, parmesan cheese and salt and pepper to taste to the recipe. But the great thing about potatoes or mashed potatoes is that you could do it however you want. So if you want more garlic, add that if you want more butter.
[01:01:45.460] – Rachel I've made mashed potatoes with cauliflower, with parmesan and garlic, which is wonderful. But I've also used cheddar cheese and bacon bits to make it a little bit more like a baked potato kind of a meal. So it's just a really wonderful creative recipe that you can modify to suit whatever tastes of the people that you have coming to your party or your Thanksgiving dinner. So it's a nice recipe, very easy, doesn't take much time and you can absolutely practice it in advance to get it to the way you like it.
[01:02:20.140] – Rachel But I'll send you the correct version of the recipe and then your listeners can try and modify it to their own tastes, OK.
[01:02:28.540] – Allan Did that come with a gravy of any sort or have you tried any Keto gravys.
[01:02:33.460] – Allan It does come the gravy. I have not made the Keto Connect version of it, but what Mike and I have done in the past is with all those wonderful juices that you get off of your turkey, we just add a little bit of xantum gum to kind of thicken it up a little bit. And that's just perfect the way it is. But you can absolutely modify that again with adding more rosemary or other fall spices to give it the flavor you like.
[01:02:59.590] – Allan OK, and you'll have plenty of drippings. That's one of the things when you're cooking the turkey, the way that I cooked the turkey, there's a lot of fluid in the pan when you're done. So you'll have tons of drippings that you can use for gravy this time and or you can freeze some of it. And when you want to have that going on later, then yeah, just mixing in some xanthum gum, which is fairly innocuous. You know, it's not not something, but it's not something you really have to be that concerned about.
[01:03:26.650] – Allan So perfect. Well, thanks, Rachel.
[01:03:30.020] – Rachel Sure.
[01:03:30.120] – Allan Next week we'll be sure at the end. Stick around to the end and we'll be sure to have another recipe for a Ketofied Thanksgiving.
Patreons
The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:
Perimenopause is a time when a woman's hormones are going amuck and it can literally ruin her life. Amanda Thebe's book, Menopocalypse, takes you through her journey and the journeys of 1000s of other women so you can know what to expect and thrive during menopause.
Also, Amanda wants to send you a signed copy of the book. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/menopocalypse for more details.
Transcript
[00:03:29.210] – Allan Amanda, welcome to Forty Plus Fitness.
[00:03:31.230] – Amanda Thank you for having me on the show. I'm happy to be here.
[00:03:34.860] – Allan You know, the interesting thing is, you know, when you see a book about menopause and your book is called Menopocalypse.
[00:03:46.950] – Amanda Think of the zombie apocalypse, this is similar to that only with menopause. Menopocalypse.
[00:03:51.610] – Allan Yes. And the subtitle on that was How I Learned to Thrive during Menopause and How You Can Too. And so, you know, the book is basically addressed to women. But I'm going to be very honest with you as a man, with a woman, with a wife or anybody around you that's aged anywhere from sometimes as early as thirty-five, all the way up to mid 50s.
[00:04:14.250] – Allan This is good stuff to know. You know, this is a playbook to understand what could be going on in their lives and your relationship and everything else. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you because even though it doesn't apply to my health, it does apply to my life because I have a wife that is going through some of these changes right now.
[00:04:33.900] – Amanda I think it's that was one of the ways I approached writing this book is obviously I'm knee deep in the fitness industry. I've been in it for decades. And this is new information for me. I couldn't find this information on our usual fitness sources. I was really quite frustrated how fitness information went from like pre postnatal pardon, you call it pre postpartum fitness and health to the over fifty health. And it was like this big chunk in the middle that was missing.
[00:05:04.590] – Amanda And it wasn't until I had my own personal experience of struggling through this time that I realized that if I could get information out there, it would be really helpful not just to women, but male trainers and husbands and partners and fathers of daughters. And my husband obviously has read the book. And as just as well, we had conversations during my time through perimenopause and menopause.
[00:05:32.760] – Amanda And he just said, I think all men should read this because it just makes us feel like we understand what's happening and we can support, you know, and help. And the male trainer has been able to support your female client is really important if you have that empathy and understanding, it goes a long way.
[00:05:52.230] – Allan It does. And because I've got I've got clients all across that spectrum and I think many of them think I'm not going to get this till I'm in my 50s. This is something that happens in the fifties, but it can start happening a lot earlier and in fact, run longer than I thought. You know, like I said, I learned a lot from the book, and I really appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation with you.
[00:06:12.190] – Allan Now when we're talking about menopause, I think I just kind of thinks it's just this this day or as a guy I would relate it to say, OK, I went through puberty and it was an awkward two years, you know, where my voice was cracking and I was growing and hair started showing up where it was supposed to show up.
[00:06:32.610] – Amanda We could stop there. I know.
[00:06:36.100] – Allan Yeah. You know, and so it's just a couple of awkward years for most of us that we go through. But menopause is very, very different because you have the different stages, the perimenopause before and then the post menopause after. Can you kind of just walk us through that cycle of what's going on when it happens, why it happens and, you know, just kind of so we can lay the groundwork.
[00:06:58.920] – Amanda Absolutely. And I really like the analogy to puberty. So, you know, I sometimes hear people saying, well, isn't menopause essentially like reverse puberty? Isn't it that type of thing? I mean, it's a life transition. Every every woman, if she's lucky enough, is going to go through it and go into old age. And essentially that is what it is. But it just comes with a lot of nuances and it comes and it doesn't just feel like a life transition because it can go on for a long time.
[00:07:27.790] – Amanda It can start late thirties and I'll go through the three different stages. But essentially, once you've reached menopause, you're in menopause until you die. So it's half your life potentially that you're in this different state where you need to have an awareness about what's happening. So the three common stages that you will hear talked about through menopause is perimenopause, menopause and post menopause. Perimenopause typically lasts between eight and 10 years on average, depending on which data source you look at. Can start any time from late 30s into into your 50s.
[00:08:08.290] – Amanda It's a time when your sexual hormones will start to decline, which are estrogen and progesterone. And what happens is they don't just stop. You know, they don't you don't just stop producing them. The end result is that you don't produce any you can't produce anymore babies. Right. Like you, you cease to reproduce. But the hormones don't just want to say, OK, that's it, you're done. Time to tie up your tubes and then move on into old age. You have an eight to ten year period where these hormones decline, but not always in a linear fashion. Progesterone tends to fall in a more finite, linear fashion but estrogen just goes crazy. It jumps all over the place.
[00:08:52.600] – Amanda And these wildly fluctuating hormones can cause a horrendous amount of symptoms for women that are often unassociated with hormones, hormones often not recognized by the medical community, and often can impede a woman's quality of life. And I don't just mean so she feels crap. I mean, so that it ruins it can ruin her life. And we'll talk about that later. And it can be managed. But not many people talk about it or are aware of how it can be managed.
[00:09:26.230] – Amanda Then we move on to menopause, which is supposedly like a line in the sand, like a timestamp of when a woman hasn't had a menstrual cycle for twelve months and she is considered to be in menopause, and then she would that day forward, she is then postmenopausal or menopausal.
[00:09:45.550] – Amanda I mean, they're words and interchangeable, but essentially you have a period of time before your periods stops and then the time after your periods stop. And that's what happens. When a woman goes into post menopause, we typically see a lot of those crazy erratic symptoms die down, but a woman can still have symptoms that impede her quality of life and will stay with all of her life after that. And then she is then also at considerable risk because of the lack of the protective hormone estrogen for major diseases that will kill her, that can kill us. And so we need to be aware of the symptomatic side of perimenopause and then the health protective side of post menopause.
[00:10:33.010] – Allan Yeah, and I think that's the thing. You know, this is this is the rest of your life. And once it's kind of starts down the perimenopause, there's a period here you've got to manage. And then after that, there's going to be a period afterwards that you then have more of a steady state. So, you know, I think one of the things that was surprising as I went through the book was how many types of symptoms there are that are associated with this, because I just thought, you know, from my wife's perspective, having the conversation is like, I'll be glad when I don't have periods anymore, you know, because she's not going to have any more children.
[00:11:06.340] – Allan So she's. It's no use for the periods in her mind, but losing your period or sporadic or erratic periods is not really the end all be all this is this is massive, the conditions that you can suffer through. Can you talk about the most common symptoms?
[00:11:24.620] – Amanda Yeah, and actually, I'm referring to my book as I talk to you, because there is so many I often can't remember to quote them all. And it's interesting because I also had the same, I might add, the same sort of viewpoint. I can't wait till this is all over. I don't need my periods. And I also assume that menopause really was just a case of you stop having your periods and you might have a few hot flashes.
[00:11:47.150] – Amanda And we know it's so much more than that. And interesting enough is that the symptoms are very individual to every woman. It's a common journey that we all share, but no one woman is going to have the same experience as another. And so these symptoms are broad scope. You may have them, you may not have them, but these are some of the more common things that women talk about during especially perimenopause.
[00:12:16.330] – Amanda So the regular periods may or may not happen. And some women lose their periods for months and months. Some have them continually. And so there's no rhyme or reason to when a woman's period can well, come on. And some continue to have regular periods right up until they reach menopause.
[00:12:35.450] – Amanda But some other things they can happen to them are things like depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue. And it's a fatigue that you just can't sleep off. It never goes away. Migrans, hot flashes, weight gain, which is like a bit of a you know, I touch on this in the book and it's not really a symptom, but it's something that seems to happen to women and when they put weight on, it definitely doesn't help with their feelings of low self-esteem and depression.
[00:13:06.230] – Amanda And sleep problems are huge. Insomnia, which is often exacerbated by night sweats, which are essentially hot flashes during the night. And women can have multiple like twenty, thirty of those a night. And losing sleep, as we know, is just terrible for our overall health and cognitive issues like short term memory loss. Even just remembering words. I mean, I've literally changed the sentence I was going to say because I can't remember a word that I was going to use.
[00:13:38.120] – Amanda And I know that that's part of aging as well. But these things are really exacerbated when our estrogen levels start to fluctuate because we have estrogen receptors all over the body. And so they're in our blood brain barrier. They're in our joints. So many women have aching, sore joints that feels like a rheumatoid arthritis. And that's essentially from the estrogen fluctuations. Sex drive is another thing. It can, it usually falls off the edge of the planet. But sometimes you can crawl the wall, but not very often.
[00:14:14.270] – Amanda But I mean, that's something that can impact relationships. And women put a lot of, you know, stress and fault on themselves. And GI issues are also another thing that women complain about. They can not get food, food, sensitivities and bloating, some irritable bowel, those type of things. And and then some of the things that, like lesser known things that women experience and I think are really relevant to the fitness crowd, are things that impact their self belief, their self-esteem and their confidence.
[00:14:46.220] – Amanda We see a real decline in that in women and that sort of lack of belief in their athletic ability. And I think that's really sad because we know women are very strong and very capable, but we see it presented to us in the gym that I can't do that. I don't think I can do that anymore. And so and that's really not a symptom, but it's definitely something that happens through menopause as well. And it's something you can work on with your clients.
[00:15:15.310] – Allan Yeah, you know, I think as we went through the book and I went through a lot of those, one that really hit me is that there's this relationship between estrogen and oxytocin. And those that don't know oxytocin is basically the love hormone. It's the feeling close and and connected. And so if you're if you're if you're dealing with some of the physical changes because, you know, when your estrogen goes down, you're more apt to store fat in your belly.
[00:15:45.010] – Allan So you're going to notice some changes in your body shape. As you mentioned in the book, I think people tend to put on about 10 pounds during that period of time. Men do it, too. So just so you know, it's not it's not just a woman thing, but 10 pounds. And even if you don't gain or lose weight during that period of time, you're storing it differently. And so it's going to be it's going to pick up from the places where you liked it and it's going to set down on some places that you might not like it so much. But all these changes to your body, all these changes in your emotions, you know, sometimes, you know, I'm not going to use the word, but women can get a little abrupt, a little stressed and a little crazy.
[00:16:28.240] – Amanda The abruptness is actually one of the positive aspects of menopause because we just don't want to stand for your crap anymore. So, you know, as far as weapons thats a good thing.
[00:16:35.680] – Allan And that's perfect. Yeah, that's a good thing. But during that transition, it's you're feeling like you're a different person. You're looking like a different person in many senses. But then now you also have this hormone change where you're just not feeling as close to people and that can really impact relationships.
[00:16:56.020] – Amanda You know, it's one of those really interesting things that I never even thought about. But I have a community on Facebook and we often talk about just how we are feeling and how we're doing. And women just kept saying all the time, I just don't feel like as close to my husband as I used to. I just I just don't I just want to be on my own more.
[00:17:15.850] – Amanda I really I really feel like I need to start looking after myself more. And it often happens at a time, you know, just statistically that our teenage children also may be sort of like being more independent and they don't need us as much. And it all sort of links together.
[00:17:33.700] – Amanda And so I dug deep into the research and I found the genuine connection between the lowering of our estrogen levels and the lowering of our oxytocin too and as you said, it's like our love hormone. And it's the thing that bonds us. And it's at our highest when we have children, when we're breastfeeding. It's the thing that sort of connects us to our partners and helps with orgasms. I don't know if that's OK. It's still on the show, but it does and and also helps, you know, with anxieties and our ability to thrive and sort of take chances.
[00:18:07.270] – Amanda And we see all of that sort of ultimately shift. But what happens is at the same time like menopause is happening. There's so many things that are changing Allan. Like you say, we are the ultimate shape shifter. We we can shape our fat deposits where they land change. We feel different about ourself. The change is happening and we're not really in control of it. And then we start to pull away from our partners and maybe our children and we start to feel as though, well, what about me?
[00:18:38.410] – Amanda And they often call it the like the we to me transition for women. And while that might seem like a little bit selfish, hearing me say this, I actually think it's a good thing. Because as mothers and as wives and as just women who are nurturers, we give, give, give all the time and we put ourselves on the back burner often. And one of the things that menopause made me realize is that.
[00:19:04.800] – Amanda Well, actually, I have to start taking care of myself now because I'm really important to their whole puzzle of my family, and if I'm not functioning properly, then the rest of it just goes to pot. Nothing works. And that's often the keystone of a like a relationship or a family. And so even though all of these changes are happening and relationships may feel different or strained or unusual, I think it's just a really good time for reflection and for us to sit down and say whats important to me right now? What makes me thrive? How can I make this situation work for me and my family and my partner?
[00:19:46.770] – Amanda And so, like for me, I went through something very, very similar to the analogy you've said, and I am with my husband at one point, like I didn't realize, but his mind was wander and he had no idea what I was going through. I was riddled with depression. And migraines that sent me to bed for days on end with no help from the medical community and I know we're going to touch on that. I eventually went to my annual gynecological checkup I suppose, like, you know, the tune up that you take in your car and follow.
[00:20:19.530] – Amanda Well, I went in for mine and the doctor recognized that something wasn't right. And he said, I think you're going to perimenopause. These are very typical symptoms and you don't need to suffer needlessly. I can help you. And I just felt this massive relief and I felt, oh, there's an answer to why this is happening. And I went to see my husband afterwards for dinner, for lunch, sorry. And I said to him, yes, I've got perimenopause and I've got depression and, you know, migraines and. Oh, my God. So you're not going to leave me then?
[00:20:54.440] – Amanda Because the poor guy the whole time had been thinking that I hated his guts, that I couldn't stand to be around him and all those things were true. But I don't feel like it was what I was feeling. I feel like if they were being masked by these horrendous symptoms that were just consuming me. So we are also good by the way.
[00:21:15.180] – Allan That's good to hear. You know, again, going through some of your story, going through some of the things that you've talked about in the book, I was like, OK, my main problem getting older is that hair is growing out of places I don't want it to grow out of. So I think I've got it pretty easy. I can figure out how to get along with my wife. But that said, there are ways that you can improve your chances, improve and thrive through this period of time.
[00:21:40.370] – Allan But you have to take a proactive approach. You can't just sit back because this is not going to just go away in a couple of days or a couple of weeks. And, you know, it's not like just getting through one migraine or saying, oh, I'm a little depressed, I'll take an antidepressant and we'll just we'll just move on.
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[00:23:25.590] – Allan Now, in the book, you talked about hormone replacement therapy, hormone therapy and bioidentical hormones, but there are also some natural remedies like black cohosh and natural Ashwagandha. Yeah, and so but there's some, you know, I think when we start talking about some of these things, because there was a study, of course, there was a study that tied breast cancer to estrogen. And while the study might not have been the best in the world at the way it was done, there's still lingering effect.
[00:23:57.150] – Allan People think that they can't do these hormone therapies or do these things because of the potential problems. Can you talk about what's available and how how someone can kind of evaluate what's right for them?
[00:24:09.750] – Amanda Yeah, it's a bit of a minefield out there. And I have to admit, I was one of those people, too. When my mom went through menopause, I was like, you are not going on any hormone therapy. I knew about this study. And I was like, that's not for you. And it was about that time for my own mom. When I went to the gynecologist and he sort of said, yeah, this is perimenopause. I can get you on hormone replacement therapy, it will help you.
[00:24:30.960] – Amanda And I was like, no way. No, I mean, this is nine years ago almost nine. And I said, I don't trust it, I don't feel good about it. So I actually opted to go on an antidepressant and the antidepressant helped with both my migraines and my depression. But when other symptoms started to come up, because they do they come and go, they you know, they fluctuate like your hormones. It wasn't enough. And by this time I'd spoken to lots of experts and I dug deep into the research and I felt very confident with my choice.
[00:25:04.520] – Amanda And I just thought it was so difficult to get this information and I didn't understand why. And so that's sort of why I wrote a whole chapter on this, because women and well, humans sorry. We hold on to the fear. It's just what we do. And so in 2002, the WHI, which is the Women's Health Institute, published a report and the report said that there was an increased risk of the following diseases. Cardiovascular disease, stroke and breast cancer by using estrogen therapy.
[00:25:38.840] – Amanda And so what their advice was right then in 2002, they said the risks are too grave to issue estrogen as a treatment and it should be stopped immediately. And so that's what happened. Doctors all over the world just stop prescribing estrogen. What happened, though, since that date is the WHI. Some of the researchers in that study came up and stood up and said we didn't even research their findings properly. We didn't actually have the chance to. It was as soon as there was an inkling there was a risk, it was published and we didn't actually analyze the data properly.
[00:26:19.010] – Amanda And so some of them have come out post hoc and analyzed it again and come up with completely different, a completely different viewpoint. And it's the viewpoint now that's shared by all of the medical bodies, including the North American Menopause Society and the British Menopause Society. And they have categorically stated that there is no increased risk for any of those diseases.
[00:26:42.320] – Amanda Specifically, breast cancer is the one that women talk about by taking estrogen therapy. No more so than lifestyle choices. And, you know, like if we drink or heavy drinkers, smoker, if we do carry extra weight, if we're on the up on the obesity, I don't really like talking about obesity like it is, but it's considered a risk factor that there is no significant statistically significantly different risk. And and in science, the statistical significance is something that they talk about. And it's it was minuit and it was so small it wasn't worth considering.
[00:27:22.820] – Amanda And so they now, all of the medical bodies, like I say, have agreed that estrogen therapy is safe and estrogen is not a carcinogenic substance. We know that. Right. So then but what happened in the meantime is during that period of 2002 and recently, I think probably in the last 10 years, I don't actually know when when people started using HRT more confidently.
[00:27:50.270] – Amanda But there was a period of time when doctors refused to prescribe estrogen therapy. And the compounding pharmacies then were like, this is our chance to like to help women out. And they did. So they were prescribing uncompounded hormones that weren't regulated. And that's just the difference, right? They were issuing women hormones that the FDA had not approved. And so there was a there was a concern about the efficacy, the safety, and also the fact that when you take an estrogen, you have to take a progesterone with it.
[00:28:27.920] – Amanda The progesterone protects your uterus. There's the compounding pharmacies were issuing a progesterone cream to women that wasn't providing enough protection to the uterus and was put women at high risk of uterine cancer. So it was an opportune moment for them. They made millions and billions and trillions probably.
[00:28:47.900] – Amanda I actually don't have never looked at the numbers, but but now we're in a situation where if a woman wants to go on a hormone therapy and she is a candidate and there's parameters that women have got to fall within, a doctor can safely prescribe FDA approved hormones for a woman to take.
[00:29:08.210] – Amanda Now, I just want to touch on bioidentical hormones because what happened, the compounding pharmacies use the word bioidentical because they said that the only hormones you could get from your doctor was synthetic and they weren't natural and they could give you natural hormones. And it's a false equivalency because it's it's just not true. The FDA have bioidentical hormones. And all that means is that the hormones are produced to match the molecular structure of the hormones in your body. And they're derived from plant sources.
[00:29:45.680] – Amanda And you can get them and have been tested for efficacy and safety and they usually covered on insurance for a couple of dollars a month, whereas the unregulated ones can cost women hundreds and hundreds every month, and it doesn't make sense to me when you're talking about cost safety against safety and lower costs. So that's where we are with bioidentical. So my advice to women and I'm not a doctor and so I'm not telling you what to do, but I've talked to experts and I've done my research is that if you want to go on hormones, you go and speak to your doctor.
[00:30:18.460] – Amanda If your doctor is not informed because many aren't asked to speak to a referral to a menopause specialist and get regulated hormones. Now, when it comes to doing things outside of medical intervention, and I have no problem with medical intervention and I just don't see why it should be a problem for people. I hear the idea that menopause is medicalized. And I'm like, yes, so what? It's a micro dose of hormones that literally gives the woman back her quality of life.
[00:30:49.570] – Amanda It can help with the symptoms. And we know it's protective against some of these major diseases that kill us in post menopause. But things, other things that a woman could do to support her journey. Like you said, the black cohosh and Ashwagandha, there have been some studies on this. But the problem is, is none of those medications are regulated. So you just don't know the quality or the efficacy of the supplements like all supplements.
[00:31:17.860] – Amanda You know that, right? So and for women with really bad symptoms, sometimes it's not enough for some women with some mild symptoms, it can be enough. But neither of those natural things will replace the estrogen that your body's lost. Neither will food. You can eat as much phytoestrogen based food as you want, which is like soy, tofu. And it will help you and it will support your body, but it will not replace the estrogen that you are losing.
[00:31:45.430] – Amanda So you can do things to add the journey and smooth the journey. And I definitely recommend that women speak to a specialist, talk about different options and see what works for them. And then also know that you may need to change it, because as your hormones change, you may not need to do everything you've been doing all along. It's like literally I don't even know how to describe it.
[00:32:10.500] – Allan Whackable
[00:32:13.630] – Amanda Something like, yeah whackable. But the upshot of it is that women do not need to needlessly suffer. There is help available for them. They should grab it and they should advocate for it and actually give women ideas on how to advocate in the medical profession, because it can be hard. We've got to we've got to be tough in there. But honestly, we deserve to be helped.
[00:32:38.120] – Allan Absolutely. Now, one of the things you got into in the book, which I thought was was really important, was one, you kind of went through some things with the healthy diet, you know, to avoid processed foods, limit your alcohol intake, those types of things that people should be just doing anyway. But you got into something I thought is critically important when it comes to food because it's not talked about enough is not just what you eat, but how to eat.
[00:33:05.650] – Allan Would you would you take us through that? Because I think this is important. We forget this. We forget this a lot. And as a result, we end up not getting the results we want or getting the health outcome we want. And I just think it's really important for people to recognize that it's not just when, it's not just how much, or what kinds of foods, but actually how we eat.
[00:33:27.710] – Amanda Psychological process around. Right. It's really important. And so like the nutrition part of my book. So the essentially the second part of the book is broke down into four areas. We have a strength training component. We have nutrition component. We have a stress management component. And we have a mind set component as well.
[00:33:47.290] – Amanda And then the nutrition component, there is no menopause specific diet. So this nutrition component is actually valid for most people. Like there's nothing in there that's rocket science, right? Like I tell you what the micronutrients do, how they respond in the body. There are some nuances when it comes to menopause for sure. And I talk about those, but essentially the whole how we, the what we eat shouldn't really change much from what we know from nutrition science.
[00:34:16.630] – Amanda But the how we eat is so important because, you know, I always think that, like menopausal women are targets. Like, you know, we are lion's share of the like the fitness world, whether with a desperate women, we have probably a bit more disposable income.
[00:34:31.900] – Amanda And so they see our vulnerability and go try this keto green diet, try this, try that supplement. And it's just, stop. Please stop doing that because it is unethical also. It's not necessary. And I think that what I've tried to do in the nutrition component is simplify everything so that a woman can just go into this with valid choices. And so I talk about like the how to eat, right?
[00:35:00.120] – Amanda So we're a nation of people that eat too quickly. We don't consider what hunger feels like. We don't know when to stop. And we eat mindlessly. We don't eat mindfully. And so don't sound like a bloody hippie, but like it really matters how you approach eating. And so I try and break that down. And so, you know, I try and explain to people that, you know, hunger won't kill you. It's OK to feel hungry. And that where we can become like robots. We can say, oh, it's noon, I better eat my lunch instead of like like sitting there and saying, I'm hungry. Am I am I ready to eat? Is it appropriate?
[00:35:43.790] – Amanda Like because sometimes we eat because it's what's expected and not what our body needs. And so the cues that I talk about help you try and understand your body signals. And these are things that can stay with you for life. And it's amazing. So some of the key things are, recognizing true hunger. Is it true hunger or is it boredom? And so I always, even just take a simple pause, even just by your tummy starts to rumble a little bit.
[00:36:13.220] – Amanda I want I ask people to sit and just think about it and say, OK, am I actually bored? Like, am I eating because I'm bored. I'm eating because I'm like, thirsty. Should I take a drink or is this true hunger and then sit for 30 minutes and just see if that hunger dies away. If it dies away, then you probably weren't hungry. If it doesn't, then eat. Right. You actually recognize what true hunger feels like.
[00:36:39.320] – Amanda And I give like a scale in the book to sort of like try and pinpoint because we boredom eaters and we will have chips on the desk and we'll eat them without even thinking and wonder why we've consumed an extra eight hundred calories a day. And so my family, no electronics at the table ever.
[00:36:59.390] – Amanda We put our electronics off, we all sit down and we converse and we actually make family meal times again where we sit down and we appreciate the food I've made because I make sure they do, that when they appreciate the food that they're eating and they enjoy food and that they appreciate like all of the cultural stuff that goes around it. Instead of just wolfing it down, watching the telly and, you know, not actually focusing on what you're doing.
[00:37:26.840] – Amanda And then specifically in menopause, the estrogen has an impact on our ghrelin and leptin hormones, which are our hunger and satiation hormones. And so if you if your body's a bit screwed up and it doesn't know if you are really hungry or if you're really full by slowing down and sort of recognizing what true hunger feels like, slowing down the eating process and stopping before you are full, you know, like stopping when you're satisfied instead of like opening the button of your jeans type full.
[00:38:03.730] – Amanda Like those are really good ways to suck you back in and recognize what real hunger and what real satisfied feeling feels like when you're eating. And I talk about that a lot in the book because it personally has worked for me and others, you know. But I truly believe in building up those type of habits.
[00:38:23.530] – Allan Now, and one of the strategies they had in the book that I thought was pretty cool was you said one of, leaving just a little bit of food on your on your plate. You know, we were taught as kids, clean your plate, clean your plate. You know, kids in India are starving, so you have to clean your plate.
[00:38:38.820] – Amanda Why did we say that?
[00:38:40.680] – Allan I don't know.
[00:38:41.620] – Amanda It's so true. It's always India.
[00:38:41.650] – Allan I don't know, but we did. And so it's just you just clean your plate. And yeah, we want to multitask so we're on the social media or we're watching the television and we're not paying attention to eating. And, you know, before you know it, you've cleaned your plate. And so kind of having those strategies in place, you know, serving yourself a good a good portion a plate, you know, knowing your portions, getting it all on your plate and sitting down at the table and and really focusing on that food.
[00:39:16.580] – Allan Putting your fork down between bites, having a conversation, you know, actual face to face conversation with your family. You know, those are those are the moments where you're taking care of your food, you're taking care of your body and you're building social connections and relationships that you know, we need.
[00:39:35.610] – Amanda And you know, they're valid ways and they're proven ways to show how to stop overeating. I mean, clearly, it matters what you put in your mouth, but I think the two things go hand in hand. You can eat the best food in the world and have all of these plans in place on what to eat. But if it feels like restriction and it feels like it's a job or it feels like this is limiting you in some way, then you're just going to fall straight back to where you were.
[00:40:02.240] – Amanda But if you approach this with a mindset that this is doing you good and that you're actually supporting your body and understanding what the body needs, then when you eat the food that you've chosen because of your knowledge that, you know will support your body, it just makes it such a smoother ride. And the chances of you stick and adhering to this long term are increased.
[00:40:25.520] – Allan Amanda, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
[00:40:34.540] – Amanda You know, I think the hardest question, you know, I know I had this coming and, I was like, oh, God, you make it sound so easy. And I was like, how can I give you three when I have like, a hundred?
[00:40:44.500] – Amanda And so but I think if we're talking about menopause, the first thing I would do, the first thing I would say is that you should control the things that you can control. Because it's the time of a lot of change and things are out of your control and so the certain parameters within your life that you actually can take a handle on. And I encourage women to do that. So whether that's like actively moving every day or choosing the food that they eat or the company that surrounds them, I would suggest that that's the first thing. So take control of those things that you can control.
[00:41:20.360] – Amanda The second thing is for a menopausal woman is build a community and that community can be just your sister or your aunt or a group of friends. It's a bit more difficult in a pandemic. But like I have an online community where women exchange stories, where talk about their problems and lessen the burden.
[00:41:42.190] – Amanda When you know that you have something that's eating away at you and literally you can't get out of this hole that you're in when you share that story with someone and get somebody else's opinion, even if they just say, hey, I hear you and I'm listening, that can just make you feel so much happier.
[00:42:00.220] – Amanda And then the last thing is do exercise that brings you joy. I'm a big believer in moving every day. And sometimes in perimenopause and menopause, you're exhausted and you don't feel like you can move. But even if it's just a patrol around the kitchen, consider that to be active movement. And so while I'm a big pusher of strength training for women and as we age, it's so important if you want to do them three times a week because it just makes you laugh and brings you joy, then do it. Like do some type of movement that makes you smile and makes you feel better about yourself when you're finished.
[00:42:39.680] – Allan Well, if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book Menopocalypse, where would you like…
[00:42:48.860] – Amanda It will fall off the tongue soon, don't worry.
[00:42:50.810] – Allan Soon enough, where would you like for me to send them?
[00:42:54.710] – Amanda Yeah, you know, everything is off if you go to my website everything there are links to my social media page, links to purchase in the book. The book came out yesterday, October 18th, which was, well, menopause day. But everything is on www.fitnchips.com. You can find everything there.
[00:43:20.400] – Allan OK, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/456 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Amanda, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:43:31.160] – Amanda I'm so happy to have been on the show and thanks for having me.
[00:43:39.300] – Allan Where Ras. Pretty good episode, you know, women's health is the highlight of October, you know, breast breast cancer awareness and things like that. And, you know, I like getting on some guests where we can talk about a single issue. But again, I hope men, you're still listening because if your significant other is going through this, you're going to have some experiences, too.
[00:44:02.960] – Ras Thanks for doing this episode on menopause. I know. I appreciate it. And it's pretty timely for a lot of women. And in October, this is perfect, perfect timing for this topic.
[00:44:15.330] – Allan You know, I think a lot of people are concerned. You know, when you start talking about hormone replacement and some of the science that was out there before talking about how it could cause cancer. And, you know, obviously that's been refuted. So if you're not on an estrogen because you're afraid of cancer, go back and do your research again, because I think you're going to find what's written out there is very different than even maybe what your doctor knows.
[00:44:39.950] – Ras That's a really good point. And menopause itself is really a scary topic for a lot of women. It kind of seems like a homeless or hopeless part of our lives that we just have to suffer through. And then when you add hormone replacement therapy to that, that's another huge red flag for us, because we've always heard that estrogen replacement is a danger. And personally, I actually have a higher propensity for breast cancer, it runs in my family. So that's always been a huge red flag for me as well. So it was really refreshing to hear from Amanda that that may not be what I had always thought it was.
[00:45:16.850] – Allan Yeah. And if you if you resonated with this episode, I just want to let you know, I try to do a menopause episode about once a year. So I've actually had a few other episodes about menopause. And if you'll go to the show notes for this episode, I believe this is episode 456. So if you go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/456, I'll be sure to have links to all of the other episodes where we've discussed menopause, because there's a lot of, a lot of new information out there and a lot of authors, you know, they don't write about this very often.
[00:45:52.070] – Allan So, you know, get a book about once a year. I do try to get them on because I think it's a really important topic. But even men, you know, I again, we are going to start talking about men's health over the course of the next couple episodes. But, you know, for you to recognize that you're struggling with andropause, you know, you're watching your testosterone and growth hormone and all those, those men feel good things going on. Your wife's going through complete chaos.
[00:46:21.470] – Allan And, you know, the link between estrogen and oxytocin is just scary because, you know, that's the empathy that's that's that's her giving a crap about what you're going through. And she might be struggling with that. So just recognizing that that hormones not only impact what our body physically does but impact what's going on in our brain. And that can actually change our mood and behavior and make someone seem like an entirely different person. So I think that's just worth paying attention to. If you value your relationship, just recognize that as a symptom. That is an issue and something that can be addressed if you take the time to do it.
[00:47:06.260] – Ras That's a really good point. That was actually a kind of a light bulb moment for me in your interview with her. The connection between estrogen and the ocytocin. Is Yeah. And and how that changes our emotions and how we cope or react to certain situations, I'm 49, so I'm right in the middle of this whole perimenopause program. And as she was checking off all these symptoms, I'm like, yeah, I felt that. Yeah, I've noticed that as well. But that that estrogen oxytocin, that's a huge light bulb moment for me. And I think this is a perfect storm situation. Allan, you mentioned that men's hormones are fluctuating as well, right along with ours.
[00:47:54.550] – Ras And then in my family, I've got another situation where my kids are in college. So my role as a mother has changed greatly. And so there's kind of like a perfect storm of situations that happen. And and how to get through all of these challenging moments is just difficult.
[00:48:14.280] – Allan Well, that's why you run.
[00:48:15.890] – Ras Yes, it is no doubt about it. it's why I run. And that's a good point, because for me, getting through all of these kinds of perimenopausal symptoms that I experience, running actually does make a huge difference.
[00:48:30.330] – Ras And I notice on the days where I have too many rest days in a row or just can't get out to run because life gets busy, I can feel it. I can feel the change happening with my emotions. And I get tired and irritable for sure.
[00:48:45.210] – Allan And so that's why you need to experiment with a lot of different things. Exercise, nutrition, in some cases, even hormone replacement might be something that's a fit for you. You've got to you've got to study this. You've got to do that N equals 1 experiment, and you've got to make some decisions. Your health care provider is a provider. They're not there to to make you do something. You have to be a part of that team. And so recognizing that if you're not exercising and you're not eating right and you're not feeling well, there might be a correlation there.
[00:49:17.430] – Allan And you've got to solve those two problems. And even when I talk about men's health with guys are like, you know, yeah, you could you could do all this stuff. You could take all these hormone replacements. But they're not going to fix you if you're not doing the other things or other things have to come first. So if you get joy out of running, run. If you get joy out of lifting heavy things, lift heavy things, you should probably do a little bit of both, to be honest with yourself.
[00:49:45.480] – Ras Yeah.
[00:49:46.050] – Allan You're given your body, all of it needs. But, you know, just find the things that give you joy, find the things that make you feel good. And particularly during this period of time, if you know is do them together. If you can, you know, you and Mike run together. We do. Which, you know, that again is beautiful, you know, because that's that's where relationships are kept. That's where you have that in common.
[00:50:06.630] – Allan And much like we talked about running clubs and how close you get to people, even when you're not running close to people these days, you know, it's just something, a bond that you have between you that that just keeps going. And so.
[00:50:20.220] – Ras So true. AManda mentioned having a support group and that that community tie, whether it's with a run club or your spouse, it can be really helpful. And the tougher days, those days when your hormones are really out of control or you're just feeling emotional, it's good to have somebody to talk to or run with or whatever it might be.
[00:50:38.990] – Allan Or lift with.
[00:50:39.960] – Ras Yeah. Yeah.
[00:50:42.090] – Allan All right, Ras, well it's good to see you again. And we'll talk next week.
[00:50:45.240] – Ras You bet, take care.
Patreons
The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:
Over the past eight years, I've followed a ketogenic diet (low carb diet) for much of the year in a way of eating I call, Seasonal Ketosis. It is a part of my ancestral-based lifestyle to promote health, fitness, longevity, and joy. Seasonal Ketosis is a form of cyclic ketogenic diet based on seasons, where I'll have a season of feasting and a season of famine each year.
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Transcript
[00:02:48.920] – Allan Ras, how are you doing.
[00:02:50.130] – Ras Great Allan. How are you today?
[00:02:52.570] – Allan A little frustrated. The Panamanian government reneged on giving us our Saturdays back. So now it's the last time I thought I was going to get a Saturday off. And it appears that they decided that Bocas del Toro doesn't. And part of it is, you know, at least at this point, they're thinking in terms of states or provinces as we are. And we just happen to be associated with Bocas del Toro province, which includes the mainland. And so they are having some major outbreaks in on the mainland. But last we heard, there was less than twelve cases here on the island.
So, you know, it's under control here. But we, you know, living under more stringent rules. So they didn't open our curfew and they didn't give us the Saturday back. So,
[00:03:38.880] – Ras Wow, it's so sorry to hear that. That's awful.
[00:03:41.850] – Allan Well, it is what it is. It's just, you know, this, too, will pass.
[00:03:45.990] – Ras Yep.
[00:03:46.410] – Allan It just means I'm going to get more miles in during my five days I can walk then.
[00:03:50.690] – Ras That's true.
[00:03:51.390] – Allan Than I normally would.
[00:03:52.880] – Ras That's true.
[00:03:53.630] – Allan So how's your week been.
[00:03:55.340] – Ras Good. Good. Got a good run in this morning. Our weather's cooling off a little bit so running was great this morning and I've got a run club tonight so I'll be getting a few more miles with some friends tonight too. So that'll be fun.
[00:04:09.030] – Allan Cool. Yeah. All right. So let's go ahead and get into today's episode. I'm going to be talking about seasonal ketosis, and it's a term that, I coined the phrase and I talked about a little bit in my book, and I recognized that I've mentioned it a few times on a few podcasts and I briefly describe it. But I wanted to go into a little bit more detail because I was talking to somebody about ketosis and they're like, oh, I could never eat like that year round.
[00:04:36.420] – Allan You know, every once in a while I want some cake or bread or something like that. And so I said, well, you can have your cake and eat it too, with some stipulations. So let's go ahead and get into that episode.
Hello and thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness Podcast, I'm really glad to have you here today. Today's show is going to be a little different. I have talked about seasonal ketosis as the way that I eat a few times on this show and on some other podcasts, but I've never really broken down how it works and why it works and what it is, specifically for me and how it fits within my overall ancestral based lifestyle.
Now, when I started this effort to go from a fat bastard to healthy and fit. I was introduced to Paleo by a dietitian and she brought up the paleo diet, explained what it was, what I could eat, what I couldn't eat, and I loved it. So I stepped away from my high carb diet and started just eating meat, fish and vegetables. I'd never heard of the ketogenic diet or the keto diet, as it's often called, but because I was on such a low carb version of the paleo diet, it actually put me into ketosis.
So I had to figure out what ketosis was because something different was happening to me and, you know, my breath and other things you hear about. But the weight loss was dramatic. So I enjoyed a lot of benefits out of the ketogenic diet. My blood sugar got steady, I had higher energy, I had less brain fog and it felt great.
Now, over the past eight years, I've continued to follow the ketogenic diet for most of the year, and I call that seasonal ketosis. Now, most people that adopt the ketogenic diet, they do it full time and they start eating low carb and they stay low carb and they try to keep their body in ketosis all the time and they see the benefits.
They would ask, why would I ever go off the keto diet if I enjoy how I feel when I'm on it? And to answer that question, for me, it's really about balance. I enjoy beer, I enjoy wine, I enjoy fruit, I enjoy yeast rolls. And occasionally I want to have a hamburger with a bun. So I pick a specific part of the year where I would allow myself to go off of ketosis. Now, I mentioned a few shows back that I had not started my famine season on time and really kind of blew it for a while. But I am back into my famine season and I've lost 25 pounds plus and still going.
But that's, that's not all this is really about. So I use seasonal ketosis as a way to stay generally healthy, to keep my health in good check, to keep my weight in a healthy body composition range. It improves my fitness, longevity, and the joy I have in my life. So I've developed an ancestral based lifestyle. And I'm not going to get into the argument about what our ancestors would or would not have eaten. I'm not going to get into the argument of, you know, how long they lived and all that. I'll talk a little bit about that. But that science doesn't interest me. I know that there were no fruits available to my ancestors in the northern part of Europe. I know that they would not have been able to transport food all around the world, so I would not have been eating nutrients from different continents all at one time.
I would not always have access to vegetables and fruits and all this other gobbledygook. I just wouldn't there'd be periods of time when I wouldn't. So but before I really get into seasonal ketosis, I do want to talk about a few key things just so we're all on the same base. When I'm talking about ancestral living, there's a few just core tenets that I'm going to throw out there. One is understanding what ketosis is now. Ketosis is when your body is burning fat.
So that can either be the fat that you're eating or it can be body fat. And in doing so, you create ketone bodies. Now, these ketone bodies are something that your brain and your body can use as fuel. Most of the time people are running on glucose. OK, there's glucose in your blood, there's glucose, you know, in the form of glycogen, in your muscles and liver. And we use that for energy most of the time.
At least that's how it's been for at least the last probably six to seven years here in the United States now. And we've also got a lot fatter. Ketones, on the other hand, can do all of that fueling. And in many cases it's more efficient and it's cleaner. It doesn't cause as many problems for us. So our bodies actually perform better, operate better and are in better health when we're in ketosis. So that's just ketosis. Now, the ketogenic diet is also called keto or the keto Diet.
It is a low carb, high fat diet that forces your body to go into nutritional ketosis. Now you can induce ketosis with exogenous ketone bodies or MCT oil, which is a medium-chain triglyceride. But that's not what I'm after here. We want healthy food. We want a healthy diet of real food that puts us into ketosis naturally. And it's not that hard to do. You just got to get the macros right and push through. Now with me, seasonal ketosis is a cyclical ketogenic diet. Now, instead of doing just a week, I do my cycles running over months, OK.
And in fact, seasons. So I'll have a season where I'll go into famine and then I'm in a strict ketogenic diet at that point. I stay in ketosis almost the whole time and then I'll have some feasting seasons when, you know, I'll go ahead and allow myself to eat what I want. I don't have any no, no's. Now I do tend to continue to eat a little bit high fat, low carb at that time, but the rules are gone. I just eat what I feel compelled to eat and enjoy the food that I have.
Now, my approach to health, a healthy ancestral lifestyle really is about health and longevity, even though we may never actually answer that question how long our ancestors would have lived. What we do know is that child mortality was much higher. We know that they didn't have the medical Know-How of modern times and they had less access to food. And we didn't have access to what, you know, most of the experts would call healthy Whole Foods. I mean, we had what was there that was all that was there. So what we didn't how we did. That's all we had.
There were no McDonald's. There was none of that stuff. And we did a lot more physical activity every day. So whatever the evidence says, you know, if people weren't living as long, it was probably for different reasons. OK, now, during those times, there would be periods, particularly in the north, where we would have feast and famine. When we would spend part of the year eating a ketogenic diet and even some periods of fasting. We didn't have food preservation. So we would have to wake up in the morning and maybe not have any food around. So we would have to go get it. We could be traveling and walking for hours and not find that.
But what we would do is if you think about it from a seasonal perspective, we would have access to more food in the spring, through the fall. So there would be fruits, there'd be vegetables, there'd be things like that. And so we would probably put on some weight between spring and fall. We'd just be a normal thing. And it was good because body fat helps protect us from the cold, keep us warmer, and it also gives us food. I mean, when we don't have food, it provides us the energy we need.
Okay, now as we go into the winter, weight loss would be the norm as we started using that fat on our bodies to keep us alive. So if we didn't have access to food, our bodies adapted to stay alive, our bodies adapted to be able to continue to do what we needed to do. I also believe that we were opportunistic eaters and we didn't have a McDonald's or a Tim Hortons or whatever it is that you have on every corner.
We didn't drink sweetened beverages. We just had water. We ate whole foods. When we killed an animal, we ate it hoof to nose. As hunter gatherers, we ate well as we could and we fasted when we had to. So we were on the land. And I think that's one of the core tenets of this is that we knew what we should eat, what we shouldn't eat, and we got that through the tribal knowledge. So, you know, I think it's really important to understand that the things that we call food today are not food. You know, groceries, as they are today, are not as nutritious as what we had been. And we've got to fix that as a people. That's got to be a priority somewhere along the lines.
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Now, another big tenant I want to talk about is fitness. Now, we were not sedentary. You cannot survive as a hunter gatherer if you're going to sit and not do anything, you just don't. So we would have to be fit. We wouldn't be able to go to a gym for cardio and strength training, but we would have regular exposure to three primary movement modalities that were really, really important for us. We would do low intensity, steady-state or LISS, as I like to call it where we had to migrate.
So, you know, food's not always where we want it to be. And the animals were moving with migration patterns. We would have to move with them if we want to be successful hunters. So this would require sometimes days of us to walk and travel, hiking, basically, and we'd have to carry our stuff with us. So if we had shelter and coats and in different clothing and blankets and all the different things, we needed tools and weapons, we would be carrying those with us. So we would go on these long, low intensity, steady state movements.
Now occasionally we would have high-intensity interval training. And you could think of that in terms of if we were hunting or we were fending off other tribes, it would require us to have some power and some skill. So working with weapons, moving for short periods of time, quickly resting, moving again, that would be normal regular activity for us. So, yes, more movement. And then finally a strength in mobility when we killed a large animal or we stumbled across a berry patch, we would feast.
Now, that would also require, in some cases, for us to lift parts of the animal and carry it back to camp, or we'd have to squat down to pick the berries that we were going to be eating. So, again, more movement. And so you can see through this, just the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is filled with tons and tons of movement. Now, we also would have work life balance. We would be putting in long commutes. We wouldn't be doing a lot of the things we do now.
But while we're working to survive, we would also understand that we needed to rest. We would understand that, you know, we would need flow. And what I mean by flow is, you know, flow is kind of fitting in with what's there. You know, we would know that there's ways to hunt. There's ways to to move. There's there's times that we need to go. And so we would start following a natural pattern of days, months, seasons.
You watch some of the shows where they depict people and they live by the moon, the moon and the seasons give them the information they need to survive. Now, if they faced a threat and then they had a stressor, which, you know, basically what a threat would do is the stress response. It would be acute, immediate, it'd be life or death. So they would have that cortisol hit. They'd have, you know, that adrenal hit and then it would be gone. It wouldn't be this long, drawn out months and months and months of things that we do to ourselves now.
So we would have a very low stress life in a general sense, as long as we were able to successfully hunt and move and do the things we needed to do. Our stress levels were much lower. We also did risk management. And that sounds kind of weird talking about our ancestors.
But the way you stay alive, the way longevity happens, is understanding the risks associated with your life is a primal living being. We weren't worried about calories, blood sugar, vitamin C, processed meat, dietary fiber, or if we had a healthy microbiome, those concepts weren't even in our head. But what we did was we followed a path that was set by our ancestors.
My ancestors would go and they'd say, we know we go this direction. This is the way we have to go this month at the moon. And then we would go, but we would have to also understand what we're facing. If another tribe moved in to the area, we might have to change the plan, but we would do it. We had risk management. We were paying attention. So the biggest risks to us at that time was infant mortality and tribal warfare.
And the only biohacking that we would have done was just making sure that we were aware of the risks and then figuring out ways to avoid them or deal with them. And then relationship would be very important to us. We worked and moved as a tribe. And in a tribe, it works to our benefit because it helps everyone's survival. We hunted in packs and were hard coded in our DNA to be socially engaged. So that relationship, that closeness is really, really important to the nature of ancestral living.
And then finally within ancestral living. I want to talk about curiosity. You know, we did tend to follow the same basic patterns, seasonal patterns, year in and year out. But we were constantly engaged with what was going on. In the world around us, because our survival depended on it. You know, we couldn't go in and ask Google or Facebook what the weather was going to be like or if we were going to have an early summer or a late winter or whatever.
There was no groundhog to do it for us either. We looked to our elders to advise us and then the tribe had to learn and adapt, and that's how we would survive hard times. Now, I recently started a blog to dive into these issues in more detail. But full disclosure, I'm a terrible blogger. I can brag about this being episode 455 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast. But you know, I've done several blogs over the years and I don't think I've ever gotten more than maybe 15 blog posts in any one blog I've ever started.
So they blog fade pretty quickly. You know, I hope that doesn't happen with this blog. But what I plan to do with that blog is explore a lot of these topics that I've talked about so far. So if you're interested in any of those, you might want to check out the blog. I'll do the best I can, but. What's probably gonna end up happening is I'll probably end up bringing some of those topics here to the podcast, so check out the blog as I get going on it. Probably not anything else on there now. But check it out. And that's where a lot of these topics are going to be discussed in more detail. And if you have any questions, feel free to join us on the Facebook group at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/Group. And just ask I'm there. I mean, I'm there to participate and help you in any way I can. So if you're interested in this topic, I would like to carry on that conversation.
So for today's discussion and then I'll be gone already for quite a while. But I really want to dive into seasonal ketosis and share why I do it and the reasons that it may or may not be right for you. The first question I kind of have in my mind when I'm thinking about this is seasonal ketosis. The same thing is cyclical keto diet? You know, and technically it is it's you know, you're cycling in and out of keto. So it is a cyclical keto diet. However, when you talk to most people about this cyclical keto diet, it's a six days on, one day off, and they call that a refeed day. And I'm metabolically capable of doing that kind of keto diet, but I'm not a really good moderation type person.
[00:22:02.340] – Allan You know, I'm either all on or all off. So if I took a weekly cheat day, you know, or carb up day, I just don't know what that day after that might be like. And I might just go ahead and have a second cheat day. So when I start my famine season, you know, in my ketogenic diet, I start dropping weight relatively quickly and then I'll get to my set point and I'm good, you know.
I like seeing two to five pounds come off in a week. What I wouldn't be a fan of is seeing like four pounds down, then two pounds up. And I'm pretty sure that's how the cyclical keto diet would work for me. And I don't really like that. It's progress, don't get me wrong, it's progress. But that's just not me. I'm happy knowing that I can have a few more carbs on my high activity days without going out of ketosis.
So if I'm going to have more carbs, I'm just going to work out a hell of a lot harder that week to make sure that I can keep myself in ketosis and have the carbs too. So if I want some fruit, I got to earn it from a from a carb, blood sugar, muscle and liver glycogen model. Now, there are some positives to the cyclical keto over full time keto. In many cases, athletic performance can be better and muscle growth is better.
I'm not a bodybuilder and I perform fine without the refits. I can I can do as much as I want to do. I need to do so again, cyclical keto is just not for me. But if you're someone who's looking for a way to do keto and then have that kind of that refeed that break, you might want to check that out. Now, why does seasonal ketosis make sense to me from an ancestral perspective?
And I've gone into some of this already. You know, I when I started this and I was learning about the paleo diet, I came across Mark Sissons primal blueprint. And now Mark laid out a very reasoned case for how our ancestors lived and ate. I used to character I think he named Duroc. So rather, you believe in human evolution, creationism or intelligent design, I don't think you can argue that we we're not doing things right now.
We've got to change something. The standard American diet is killing us. You know, back then we didn't eat refined grains and we didn't have junk food. You know, we were hunters and gatherers. We were, like I said, opportunistic eaters. And we ate the nutrition that our body required, essential amino acids and essential fats. They came from animals, primarily red meat and fish. That's where we got our food. Most of our food was going to come in that form.
And then based on the seasons, you know, we had short periods of the year where it was either cold or dry. We were in ketosis because there just might not be any vegetables or fruits available to us during periods of time. And then, of course, because, you know, food availability and everything, we would spend a good bit of time fasting or intermittent fasting or maybe some extended fasting, depending on the nature of what's going on in the world.
You know, if if we got a good, cold, hard freeze and all the animals are moving and there's no, you know, no vegetation at all, we got to go with the animals. We got to catch up to them. And then we got to do the hunting. So just recognize that our diet would have been very keto for much of the year. OK, now I started doing this for weight loss. That was my my core reason. And I was very much drawn to the primal paleo diet because it made intuitive sense.
Mark did a really good job, because it was maybe the first article I read, that you can't eat what you don't have access to. So you wouldn't eat processed foods at all, ever. OK, everything we would have eaten. Would have been whole food. It would have been locally and sustainably sourced and the human body was designed to be a hunter. I mean, there's no doubt whatsoever when you look at our features, look at what we can do. We were designed to be hunters, but when there are fruits and vegetables available, we're probably going to eat those. But we would not have eaten a high carbohydrate diet year-round. It's just impossible for any of our ancestors short of just some very small areas, you know, in the tropical zones where people would have eaten primarily carbohydrate diets that just wouldn't have anyone from northern Europe, anyone pretty much if you're from Northern Europe or Europe at all, your ancestors probably didn't eat a lot of fruits and vegetables.
That's just that's just part of it. Now, you can look at the current chronic diseases, obesity, heart disease, stroke, type two diabetes, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And the health problems are associated with our food. There's something seriously wrong. In our modern world, most people have insulin resistance or metabolic syndrome. And it's it's so epidemic that it's just weird to me that this has become politicized. That, you know, we have the food companies telling our government what to tell us what to eat is kind of crazy. It's not animal products and saturated fat that are making us sick as much as those food companies want the government to tell us that it is. It's just not true. It's the fast food. It's the processed foods.
It's high, refined carbs and sugar. We're eating too much sugar. We're eating too many refined carbs. We're not eating whole food. So if the government was in our favor doing the things that it was supposed to do, they'd be focused on food quality. They would not be telling us to eat cereal and grains and refined carbs. They would be telling us to eat meat, fruits and vegetables, Whole Foods.
Now, I've interviewed experts across all spectrums of nutrition. I've had vegans on I've had carnivores on paleo, keto, everywhere in between. The interesting thing is, is every single one of them will tell you that their way of eating is the best because it is based on high quality whole food. And they'll be able to pull out the studies that show people eating their diet. Whole Foods are crushing it. They're doing great. But what's hard is that they ignore Whole Food studies that say the exact same thing about a different type of diet, because it doesn't fit their world view, it doesn't fit their paradigm.
They have a cognitive bias. So, I just really struggle when someone tells me that the quality of your vegetable matters, but the quality of your meat doesn't. It's just all meat is bad. Or and people say the same thing you know, the other way. Is the quality of the meat matters, but all vegetables are bad. You know, that doesn't make sense to me. Our bodies were designed to eat both. Quality is what matters.
That's why the paleo diet makes sense to me. I think everybody should be trying to eat more whole food. You know, the debates out about whether we would have eaten potatoes or, you know, and I don't think we would have eaten much dairy, to be honest with you, because we didn't have cows. You know, we didn't have goats.
We hunted them or something similar to them. But we didn't we didn't have any animal product like that. We weren't domesticating the animals, so we weren't doing dairy. Beans, you know, those are a little weird because yeah, there are some issues there where we have to be careful with them. But, you know, I like the primal experience of having a big, juicy steak. I just do. I love having a cup of blueberries or blackberries and the sweetness and the tartness and just, I love that.
I'm not going to give up either one of them, I'm just not. My diet is comprised of meat, fish, vegetables and some fruit. I did try the Carnivore diet for a few weeks and I started missing vegetables. I tried the vegetarian diet and then I adapted it into the pescaterian and diet to try to get my protein. And I couldn't do it. I gained weight because I was eating too many fruits and vegetables and grains, so I just started putting on weight. So there's not something that I enjoy. And, you know, when I when I do these did these little experiments, you know, I was typically doing them during my my feasting season. So, you know, was not a period of time when I had to worry about being in ketosis. I just did what I did.
I think it's important for you to understand that whole food is the answer. However, you choose to put that in a way of eating is really about you. But I will say this. If you're going to try seasonal ketosis, you do need to think about a few things. OK, one, I don't. Have any insulin resistance or diabetes or, you know, I don't have any of the the diseases or any of the issues that that people would would be suffering from, that they might be using this as a protocol. So if you have insulin resistance or diabetes, you know, or you're using the ketogenic diet for cancer, Alzheimer's disease, PCOS, or an autoimmune auto immune issue, I wouldn't necessarily cycle off of the ketogenic diet.
Those protocols are specific about staying in keto the whole time. And so that's not something where you would want to cycle out because you're just setting yourself up. If you're way above a healthy body composition and you want to use keto to lose weight, seasonal ketosis is also probably not something for you because your weight is going to fluctuate. I fluctuate 10 to 15 pounds each year as I go through these cycles. So that is, and then, of course, if you're prone to eating disorders, you know, you need to find a way of eating that you're comfortable with.
If it's sustainable for you, the cycling in and out is probably not in your best interest, you know, except for this slip up. I had recently did a covid-19 I've been able to manage my seasons stably for the last eight years. You know, going into my feasting season in late August, early September, and then coming out of it right after the Super Bowl or my birthday at the first week of February. That's my feasting season.
And then my fasting season or famine season, as I call it, will run the rest of the year. And as I said I might put on 10 to 15 pounds during the feasting season, but I ditch that weight pretty quickly and spend my famine season at my lower, lower range of my set point. Now, I love the metabolic flexibility that I have to be able to spend part of the time in ketosis and part of the time having a little bit more carbs.
When I say more carbs, I'm talking about beer and some simple carbs. You know, it's like I'll have a hotdog, I'll have a hamburger. Someone offers me a piece of pie at a tailgate, I'll eat it. So that's kind of that thing. You know, to me, the weight loss is relatively easy. Once I'm in ketosis, my body just naturally says, OK, you don't you don't need this. And some of what I'm flushing out from a weight perspective is water.
But a lot of it is body fat and it goes pretty quickly. And I'm pretty happy with that. Now, if you're interested in diving deeper into this topic, there's two ways that you can do this. I talked about the group earlier, you know, 40+ Fitness Podcast, dotcom focus group, or you can go to the Web site – 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/455. And there's a comment section under this post.
I put a post with the transcripts each week and that's why I tell you the full show notes are there. If you go there, there's a comment section, you can leave a comment there. I'm pretty passionate about the benefits that I get and the flexibility I get and the freedom I get with seasonal ketosis and my style of ancestral living. So I love talking about it. If you want to go into more detail with this, I encourage you to go check out one of those two places and let's continue the conversation there.
[00:34:12.300] Allan All right, Ras welcome back.
[00:34:15.510] Ras This is great. A lot of good stuff in the episode.
[00:34:19.320] Allan Yeah, you know, most people that will talk about ketosis, they talk about in terms of it being a permanent lifestyle. And it can be. But I think it's it's kind of easy for people to get roped into measurements or things and not necessarily doing it for the right reason. I knew that I was going to roll up on football season and want to go tailgating. You know, since I finished my Tough Mudder, I was like having a beer and I was out of ketosis that afternoon, that evening.
[00:34:50.880] Allan So, you know, just for my life style perspective, it just didn't make sense. They're going to be periods of time that I was not. But I found a manageable way that I could spend some of the year in ketosis and get the benefits that I wanted to get, but at the same time, spent some time doing some things that I enjoy.
[00:35:11.220] Ras That sounds great, I'm glad that you found this new way to work keto into your normal lifestyle. That sounds like it's flexible enough to work with the way that you like to live.
[00:35:23.000] Allan It does. You know, of course, you know, this year I had a little bit of difficulty getting out of the beast mode just with everything that was going on. I did put on a good bit more weight than I normally would have. But I've dropped almost all of that now and I'm back down to near a low for the last five years, I've been running at about two hundred and seven pounds.
And I'm right about there right now. I think I'm going to push it down a little lower because my muscle mass is a little lower than it was five years ago. So I'm probably going to push my weight down below two hundred before I kind of level things out again. So I do see some fluctuations with my weight and I know that can be challenging for a lot of people.
[00:36:11.350] Ras Yeah. That's what I wanted to ask you about that. As you watch the scale go up and down, how does that impact mostly how you feel? Because to me a few extra pounds can feel kind of yucky and sluggish for me. But for you, how does that feel when you're in the fisting mode versus the famine mode?
[00:36:31.660] Allan Yeah, well, first off, I'm but I'm about five foot 11, so I can I think I can carry 200 pounds pretty well and I can carry up to two fifteen I would say. I don't actually worry about the scale as much. I mean occasionally I'll step on it during my fisting mode just to kind of see where I am. I can usually just guess by looking at how my pants fit.
I before we move down here to Panama, I found a pair of cargo shorts that I liked. So I bought like four or five different pair and different colors of the same cargo shorts. And so they all fit me the same way. And so I can just pretty much tell when I put those cargo shorts on how I'm doing and where I am. And as I mentioned, I eat relatively low carb during my feasting season. So I'm not crazy on carbs.
It's just I don't really worry about it. If, you know, if I'm out with folks, we want to have some beers. I don't think about it. You know, if someone offers me something that I wouldn't normally eat like a hamburger with a bun, I'm going to eat it. I'm not going to worry too much about it, but I do pay attention to my size. You know, if I didn't start noticing that I'm getting bigger, then I'll I'll tap it down a little bit.
I won't I won't go as crazy. Well, except during COVID. But…
[00:37:54.320] Ras Yes, totally different rules for covid.
[00:37:58.930] Allan And so, you know, if you're someone that's really stuck on the scale and you just know there's this weight, your magical weight you're supposed to wear, your head tells you, this is my no, you're not going to like this. You know, the interesting thing is, like, you know, like I said, I'll put on ten, fifteen pounds in a swing. So from my feasting to that, I will put on up to fifteen pounds.
You have to recognize that about about five or seven of that is water weight. And I flush that the first week I go back into ketosis. Right. You know, so I'll literally sit there and say, OK, I'm going to go in ketosis, you know, drop five to seven pounds in a week or two. And then it then it tapers down and I'll lose a few pounds a week and then one pound a week and then my body will get to that homeostasis, its happy weight and I just go by how I feel.
Now I've mentioned this before on another episode I was talking about this a little bit. I don't feel as good during the feasting season, you know, because the foods I'm eating or not is healthy. You know, the beer is not a health food.
[00:39:11.260] Ras That's true. Sadly, sadly true.
[00:39:13.260] Allan As much as they'll try to tell you it's okay. It's really good. No, it's not actually really good for you at all. That's fake science. Someone wanted that to be true. They made the hypothesis and then they just said, well, it doesn't kill you, so it's got to be good for you.
[00:39:27.730] Ras Great. Great science.
[00:39:29.450] Allan Yeah. So, you know, don't if you're someone who's going to freak out about the scale, if you're someone who has issues with your eating, this is not that kind of thing. You know, find one way that works and stick with that would be my recommendation for that. If you really worried about the scale, stay in ketosis.
But I also want to preface it. You know, I notice I do feel better in ketosis. It's just a better state for me to be in. But I'm not all that tight end up being that way all the time. You know, I'm okay to have a couple bad, you know, days where my energy level is not as high or, you know, I feel a little frumpy. I'm cool with that. It's the price I pay for the detour I took, and I just accept that.
If you're someone who's doing it as a protocol for cancer, for diabetes, insulin resistance, any other metabolic issue, then it's something you're probably going to want to stay on. It's not something that I want to cycle through.
[00:40:31.030] Ras That's a good point.
[00:40:31.030] Allan You know, even the people that do cyclical, where they're taking one day off per week, I said that that would actually drive me bonkers because I would feel like I was making all this progress dropping, like I said, seven pounds in a week, only to pick four of them back up. Yeah, it would be like that's all I'm doing is flushing water. I'm not really losing any weight.
And so I would struggle with that kind of cycle. Whereas if I'm off, I'm off. If I'm on, I'm on. And that's another thing about my personality, you know, and I talk about in the wellness chips, you've got to know yourself. You got to be self-aware. And it's one of the things I know is I don't have a dimmer switch, the light switch, maybe I'm on or I'm off.
And so it's just easier for me to say, okay, flip the switch and I just do it.
[00:41:24.010] Ras Yeah, it's a good point. I think that the cyclical, you know, one day a week where you can have a cheat day or cheat meal or whatever, it's a slippery slope because food can be a trigger. And if you have that one serving of chips, that might become the bag of chips and then it might be one more serving the next day, in the next day. And it is a slippery slope. And if you're not confident in your ability to put it away and get back to it, then that can be dangerous.
[00:41:52.180] Allan Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that I would like to mention is that, you know, we're starting to get anecdotal evidence and maybe some studies where we're looking at performance of someone who's in complete ketosis versus someone who uses carbs as a fuel along with ketones versus someone who's just a sugar burner. And, you know, I'm not going to say one fueling mechanism is best for everybody, but I would put this out there for anyone that is trying to do in terms sport, the heavier you are, the more weight you have to carry for the miles that you're traveling, the more wear and tear you have on your body.
And if you're eating refined carbs specifically and sugar, you're going to have inflammation and that inflammation is going to cause problems in your joints. And so from a health perspective, I would I would be the one that would air on the side of using ketones for for energy.
If I were doing endurance athletics, an occasional carb up here and there before a race might help your performance. But, you know, I'm not sure how much additional glycogen your body is going to be able to carry for that particular event. And you're always going to want to practice what you're going to race. So you would be eating carbs as a regular probably thing each week to carb up for your long runs if you're following the standard training protocol. So you would still be eating a good bit of carbs as a part of that.
So I'm not saying one is better than the other from a performance perspective. I'm just thinking in terms of wear and tear on your body inflammation and you just weigh a little bit less, you know, in carrying less water. So, you know, yeah. All of that's going to probably, in the end, help your performance. But I don't they don't have enough evidence right now where I would say there's one superior fueling way.
[00:43:55.510] Ras Yeah. And I think as an endurance athlete, that's what kind of attracted me to keto in the first place, was I needed to lose a few extra pounds that I was carrying around. Every time we've moved and and we've moved several times as a family, we set up the house. We have projects I can't get in the runs. I gained a few pounds and so I looked to keto for just something different, a way to just get those pounds off. And it actually worked for me.
The one or two times that I've actually ate something non kaido. It impacted me greatly. I was very sick so I can't really do too much cheating. I know I've got a limit. I probably can eat something that's bread or sugar, but not very much more than a bite of cake or something small because it will impact me. But as far as the endurance part of it, it has helped a lot in my running.
I'm not winning races or anything. I've never been fast either in the first place. But yeah, keto has been a real big help for me in the endurance field. But like we like you mentioned earlier and just a little while ago is that you really need to find what works for you as an individual and there's just a wide range of eating, I could give you a couple of names of some impressive vegan ultra runners. Scott Drake is probably one of the most famous vegan ultra runners.
And then to the exact opposite, Michael McKnight, just this summer or spring, actually ran a hundred miles and no calories, nothing, no food. One hundred miles. I want to say, he did it in 18 hours, if I remember right. But so he's he's definitely keto. But like you were mentioning, he is also carving up a little bit in the week leading up. So his body was fueled with carbs, but then he goes straight kitto so that his body is prepared with fat as well.
And I think that's probably how he survived it. But he's also a pretty famous keto ultra athlete.
[00:46:05.330] Allan Yeah, I as over the years I found I can get into keto pretty easy. I don't really do the of flu thing anymore since I go in and out, you know, each year I don't really have a kid, I feel a little less energetic for a day or two, but the switch over for me is pretty quick. So that's one of the things I like about doing it the way I do it. But that said, not everybody would you might not have the same experience that I had.
So, you know, the what's that they say in the ad is the results you see might not be your results right into it. So I'm not going to say everybody would have as easy of a time going back and forth. I don't have any insulin resistance. I don't have any blood sugar issues. You know, my awarenesses always been fine. So for me to switch back and forth seems relatively easy, you know, but like I said, most of the year, I'm eating this way anyway.
The difference is just not paying attention to my carbs, are not being worried about the carbs. And so that's why it works. And the other side of it is I don't stress about rather on that point five or point to five as far as what my ketone levels are, as long as I'm in ketosis, I'm cool. But a lot of people are like, no, I want to see that. No, I want to be one point five or better.
And I bought a Keto Mojo not long ago to replace my other ketone meter that I lost. I guess I can't find it after I moved. I'll probably find it when I go get the rest of my stuff. But anyway, so I bought it and they introduced this new where they measure your glucose and you measure your ketones at the same time. And we do that. It gives you a different measure relative so ketones relative to glucose. And so it's an index that they've created.
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And so again, it's just one of those. But again, it's that competitiveness of seeing a higher number that it seems to be pushing toward. And I'm not a big fan of that. You're either in ketosis or you're not. You're not. You know, you can say you're more in ketosis. I mean, there's just more ketones circulating in your blood. So I don't think you're in more ketosis. You just can't be more perfect.
You can't be more pregnant as you are. There are the days you might feel more pregnant than you did the day before. But you know that you're not in you know, you're not in more ketosis. You're in ketosis, you're not. And so it's for me, it's a good protocol. But I'm a little bit different in that I don't have a health issue. I do it to thin out, to lean out a bit, because if I did the feasting all year round, if I ate that way out of control, I would blow up, you know, so I know I can't do that and I have to be very cognizant of it.
I wasn't this year. I went and I stayed with it and just kind of proved my point of once I broke that that that barrier that I had my set point for my body, it said, oh, good, we'll just throw in a lot more weight. We don't have a problem with that. You gave us the fat cells years ago. We know how to use them. Just keep feeding us. And it did. So, you know, you got to turn that around.
And for me, it's when I said no dimmer switch just flipped the switch and let's go.
[00:49:25.580] Ras That's awesome. You must be very metabolically flexible then to be able to go on and off and in and out of ketosis. And your body doesn't give you the pain that a lot of people get with people it doesn't know, you know.
[00:49:38.780] Allan I'm very fortunate. I know a lot of people are not like that. They struggle to get into ketosis. And once they're there, like, I love this, I'm never going back. And, you know, that's cool. But, you know, you eat something bad like you said, you don't maybe you don't even know it has sugar in it or as many carbs in it as it does. And you eat it and you fall out of ketosis.
Now, people do that all the time and go right back into ketosis and never even know they were out of ketosis. So it's not this magical state. Where you're going to have to go through keto flu every time you go in and out, because people are going in and in some levels, most people are in a mild state of ketosis almost every morning they wake up because you've gone, you know, eight or 12 hours without eating. So your body is starting to produce ketones.
Now, is it using them efficiently as a fuel? No, because you're immediately going to put some more glucose in the system. You know, if you're very active, like you do your endurance sport and you're burning down some glycogen in your muscles and your liver. So when you do have additional carbs, some additional carbs, your body's going to use this insulin to restore that. So if you need it in the liver, if you need it in the muscles, then insulin is going to do its thing to do that.
If you didn't do any work and you're already topped up with glycogen, then it's only got one other choice and it's going to start making fat. So if that's something you're trying to avoid, you want a better body composition. I can't think of a better way to do it than keto.
[00:51:09.910] Ras Yeah, that sounds about right. That's what I've experienced as well.
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In her book The Ketogenic Key: Unlock the Secrets to Lose Weight, Slow Aging, Stop Inflammation, and Prevent Disease, Lori Shemek shows us how to use the ketogenic diet for optimal wellness. Most of the health issues we deal with today are caused by poor nutrition choices. With all of the health and fitness information available, it can get really confusing. Lori helps us understand how to make keto an everyday lifestyle that gives us better health.
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[00:02:55.110] – Allan Rachel, how are you doing?
[00:02:57.160] – Rachael Great, how are you, Allan?
[00:02:58.430] – Allan I'm doing really good. How's your week been?
[00:03:01.710] – Rachael Good. Had a good week, got in a couple of good runs. One was in total rain, but it was awesome. Yeah.
[00:03:09.360] – Allan Good. Good. Yeah. I actually on Monday put in 13 miles walking. So it was a little over three and a half hours of walking.
[00:03:21.470] – Rachael Wow.
[00:03:21.750] – Allan I loved it. Almost got hit by a truck. A friend of mine was coming around the corner. You know, I think he was going a little too fast and I was wiping the sweat off my forehead because I was somewhere around mile 11 and I was just a little tired. I wasn't quite paying attention and I had my headphones on and just about, smack. But, you know, other than the initial cortisol hit that I got, that gave me a little bit more energy to finish that about walk. It was a really good walk.
[00:03:49.800] – Rachel Good, Glad you're OK.
[00:03:51.840] – Allan All right. So let's go ahead introduce today's guest. Our guest today is a doctor in psychology with a certification as a nutritional consultant and a life coach. She's written several books, including the book we're going to talk about today, the Ketogenic Key. And she's been featured on TV, on the Doctors, on various radio shows, speaking and helping clients, companies, and others optimize their health, reversed inflammation, and create weight loss success. With no further ado. Here's Dr. Lori Shemek.
Transcript
[00:04:22.230] – Allan Dr. Lori, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:04:25.080] – Dr. Shemek Hey, Allan, thank you so much for having me. You know, it's an honor.
[00:04:29.160] – Allan Well, I'm really excited to talk to you because it's actually been a while since we we talked. I was on your podcast, I think it was about three, three years ago. Maybe. I don't know.
[00:04:41.290] – Dr. Shemek Wow, a lot has changed in three years, hasn't it?
[00:04:43.770] – Allan It absolutely has. A whole different world.
[00:04:46.830] – Allan Now, your book is called The Ketogenic Key, Unlock the Secrets to Lose Weight, Slow Aging, Stop Inflammation, and Prevent Disease.
[00:04:56.730] – Dr. Shemek Right.
[00:04:57.420] – Allan That's a pretty big key.
[00:04:59.380] – Dr. Shemek Yeah, it is. And, you know, it's it's actually ketosis, which promotes all of those wonderful benefits. And so, like you and I were discussing earlier, I should have named the book The Ketosis Key, because it is the driving factor in all of these wonderful things like weight loss, you know, slower aging, longevity, inflammation, reduction, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, it's it's definitely the key ketosis. So it's not just the ketogenic diet either. It's the ketogenic diet. It's intermittent fasting, it's exogenous ketones or supplementation and exercise. And the great thing is you can do them separately or together. And if you do even two of them together, it's very powerful.
[00:05:48.420] – Allan Yeah, I guess I'd sit there and say I do what I call seasonal ketosis. And so I'll spend a year in ketosis, which I am right now, and then I'll spend a good part of the year out of ketosis because I like tailgating and drinking beer and eating crap food and just watch a football game and then, you know, the first Thanksgiving and Christmas come around and my birthday's in February and so that's my feasting season.
[00:06:16.650] – Dr. Shemek Clean up month.
[00:06:17.200] – Allan Just let it go.
[00:06:18.020] – Dr. Shemek Yeah.
[00:06:18.250] – Allan Just let it go. And then after after my birthday in February, then I'll say, OK, now I'm going to hit by my fasting season. So my famine season like ancestors would have had when it was colder weather and there wasn't access to any vegetation to eat. And so now they're having to eat more fatty foods to get the sustenance and they're going into ketosis. In many cases they're fasting because you can't keep meat without a refrigerator and other means so they had to eat what they kill pretty quickly.
[00:06:54.440] – Allan But they'd wake up in the morning some mornings and there would not be any food there. So they'd get up and they go, you know, do their hunts and they find their food and then they have maybe a pretty nice lunch, then a really good dinner. And so they're in a natural, you know, intermittent fasting mode. And I found every time I get into ketosis, I just naturally fall into intermittent fasting it's just a natural thing.
[00:07:19.770] – Dr. Shemek Right. And that's what's so beneficial about all of these is that, you know, you do enter a state of ketosis and it's even more powerful if you do intermittent fasting, in fact. So if you can tag on intermittent fasting to any of the other options that we list in the book, then you're even, it's even more powerful. So it's all out there, all powerful in and of themselves, which is a really wonderful way to look at your health.
[00:07:50.460] – Dr. Shemek But when you combine, like I was saying earlier, just even two of them, you're doing incredible, power stuff.
[00:07:59.850] – Allan I'm doing three of your four right now, ‘m eating really low carb. And so that's putting me into nutritional ketosis. And I measured it the other day. I'm also doing exercise. So I do these long haul walks almost every morning that I can. I'll walk for two, three hours and then, you know, that puts me a little deeper into ketosis and I'll do that fasted. So, you know, waking up in the morning.
[00:08:24.760] – Dr. Shemek Oh, perfect.
[00:08:25.430] – Allan My last dinner was at seven o'clock, six thirty seven o'clock. We tend to eat a little early and then, you know, so it's then I got at least two, two and a half hours before I go to bed. So I go to bed then.
[00:08:37.320] – Dr. Shemek Thats even better.
[00:08:38.370] – Allan I wake up in the morning. I wait until, you know, about eight o'clock and that's when it's a little warmer than I think most people want to walk, but I don't care. I'll Honey badger that and do a good long walk. And so by the time I get…
[00:08:52.740] – Dr. Shemek Well that's a good…The heat is a good hormetic stressor as well. So another powerful factor.
[00:09:01.900] – Allan Well, there was definitely some heat today, but so so, you know, here I am. I guess I'm sitting here at 12:30 as we're recording this. And I haven't eaten a thing today. I had some I had some coffee in the morning, but nothing in it. Just black coffee and did my long walk. And I'm going to do this and do a couple other things. And I'll probably be about two o'clock and I'll go ahead and have my first meal of the day.
[00:09:25.540] – Allan So I'm putting all three of them together, which really works well for me. I had a kind of a setback and I'm going to I talked about this in an episode a couple of weeks ago about, you know, I think everybody talks about the covid 15. And I was a victim of it, too, you know, just being locked in our house because it was we were not allowed to go out at all. And so being locked in the house, I just really tapped my motivation and I was down. So I wasn't moving. I wasn't eating well. And, you know, I was taking in a little bit more alcohol than I should have and so I put on…
[00:10:01.510] – Dr. Shemek You're not alone.
[00:10:02.530] – Allan Yeah, I know.
[00:10:03.490] – Dr. Shemek It's rampant right now. Yeah. And it's better in the States. It's better. You know, I think the world at large is getting a little bit better with covid, but yeah, it's, it's, it's rougher in some areas. But nonetheless many people have paid the price in one way or another with this horrible virus. So. Yeah, and it's and that's the, well the irony of the thing is that in order to get through it in a healthful way, we want to be you know, we want our immune to be stronger.
[00:10:39.070] – Dr. Shemek And we do have that innate immunity. But with the, I guess, emotional eating and the lack of exercise, it puts us down a notch in terms of our immune strength. So, yeah, it's it's a tough road.
[00:10:53.320] – Allan Yeah. So enter into the picture nutritional ketosis. And I'm happy to say that I started so really eating low carb in May, May 1st and since May 1st, I have lost all of that and more. So now I'm into my…
[00:11:09.940] – Dr. Shemek Wow!
[00:11:10.600] – Allan Because I kind of pushed off. I didn't do my famine season when I had planned to because of everything that was going on with, you know, issues and, you know, all that and then getting locked in. I was like, so that just didn't happen the way it would have normally happened for me when I got around to February. So I stepped up and said, OK, here I am in May, I need to start now. And I started and I've been generally in and out of ketosis for the last couple of months. And then this this last Monday or so I said, OK, that's it, I'm going deep. And that's when I started, you know, putting together those three.
[00:11:45.940] – Allan But one of the things I wanted to get into, because I know the benefit of nutritional ketosis, because I can I can drop twenty pounds in three months really easy when I'm in ketosis. So the weight loss is that's a no brainer. That's going to happen for all of us. If we if we have the fat to lose, we will lose it. But I tried exogenous ketones when they first started coming out. They were nasty.
[00:12:15.360] – Dr. Shemek Yes, I know. Right. Oh, I've heard some names you don't want to hear.
[00:12:20.930] – Allan Oh yeah, I was like…
[00:12:20.960] – Dr. Shemek It's like, oh thank God I've never had to try it and the delicious ones. Right.
[00:12:27.940] – Allan OK, yeah well so I tried one, I tried them when I first, started coming out and I was like, oh my God. And I said, well I need to do this. I want to try. It's an experiment. You know, I'm on the podcast and I want to be able to talk about them. And, you know, I was thinking, OK, that really, the concern I had was if you go into if you start doing a ketogenic diet and your body's not used to using ketones, then you're peeing them out. And that's why we're able to measure them with the urine stick.
[00:12:57.500] – Allan So my concern was if I just throw exogenous ketones on my body as a sugar burner, aren't I going to do the same thing? So I was really concerned about whether I was, I had spent,because they were expensive also.
[00:13:10.620] – Dr. Shemek Right.
[00:13:11.610] – Allan So I spent a lot of money on something that was really nasty. And I didn't, you know, other than saying maybe it would help me transition to keto or if I were doing a long distance endurance sport, then exogenous ketones would seem to make sense. But in the book, you put forward a case that it's even better than that, that there's a lot of use cases for them. Can you can you talk about that?
[00:13:35.860] – Dr. Shemek Yeah. You know, and that's the thing when you use supplemental ketones, it really does put you into a state of ketosis within 30 minutes. That's the advantage. The problem is, is it doesn't stick around as long as if you were to be, say, on a ketogenic diet. Right. And so this is really one of the wonderful things about ketones in terms of a beta-hydroxybutyrate BHB, as it's referred to often. This ketone is powerful and that it can really mitigate all sorts of inflammatory conditions and other areas in terms of optimizing your health.
[00:14:14.230] – Dr. Shemek So what we want to do is we want to up level our, you know, our physical fitness, our ability to to utilize these ketones. And when you become metabolically flexible and even if you're not, you're still utilizing them. Right. Your body really loves ketones. And it's just that it's just not equipped at that moment to say when you're, you first embark on a ketogenic diet to use them. And so, you know, the reason that people are feeling so good and wonderful and athletes do so well on it is because you're up leveling, you're boosting your mitochondrial health, your cellular health.
[00:14:59.680] – Dr. Shemek There's more ATP going on. There's less glucose machinations, if you will, within the cell, which produces a whole lot of oxidation ROS. And that means it's similar to like a a car, an electric car which burns clean versus gasoline powered car, which burns dirty exhaust. Right. That's what happens when you burn glucose. But when you burn ketones for fuel, you have a better form of energy, a more therapeutic, if you will, form of energy that really optimizes every part of your health, including brain health.
[00:15:39.770] – Allan So, yeah, so I guess as I look at exogenous ketones, I still go back to I think, you know, they're good, if you're when you're first trying to get in to ketosis, they're probably a pretty good thing to help you through the keto flu a little bit.
[00:15:53.190] – Dr. Shemek Yeah, it will.
[00:15:54.470] – Allan Making sure you're getting your electrolytes and plenty of water.
[00:15:58.790] – Dr. Shemek Your potassium, right. Magnesium.
[00:16:01.310] – Allan So I have the I have the the supplements and all that to try to make sure that particular as I go into this, losing my water, I'm going to be cool. I also, like I said, if you're an endurance athlete, there's some I think there's a lot of benefit to having them because at some level.
[00:16:17.010] – Dr. Shemek Oh, yeah Allan.
[00:16:17.610] – Allan And as a long distance thing.
[00:16:19.730] – Dr. Shemek But you have to be careful because you know and now if it's if it's a for example, it's a high energy sport, one that, you know, say high intensity interval training or something. You have to be careful in terms of, you know, hitting that wall, if you will. But if it's an endurance sport, you're really good to go. Part of the reason is the steady state of energy that we have when we're using the supplemental ketones.
[00:16:47.690] – Dr. Shemek We don't have that spike in blood sugar. So it keeps our glucose stable. And I'm not sure if you're aware that the Tour de France, the team there was one team that used exogenous ketones and they did, it was an incredible win using these ketones. And so that was in 2018. And then in 2019, a large number of these teams were using them. So there's still the competitive factor. But nonetheless, that first 28 go round, that team won simply with the exogenous ketones.
[00:17:26.510] – Allan And that's what I'm saying, you know, when I when I was when I was training heavy, I was trying to get ready for a Spartan. I had hired a coach. And, you know, I go in there and the cool thing was, you know, of course he's a fitness geek and I'm a fitness geek and I'm going to be working out and he's training me and is like, you don't really need, he says you don't really need a trainer, and I'm I like absolutely need a trainer.
[00:17:46.040] – Allan And he says, well, you know you know more about this stuff than I do. And I said, well, so. Give me a program. Let's talk about the programming. Let's talk about what's going on. And so, you know, he's trying to…
[00:17:55.690] – Dr. Shemek Let me tweak it for you.
[00:17:57.320] – Allan Well, I did very little tweaking. I actually did his program. It was built it was built a little bit more towards the being a 20 year old than I would normally have done. But it was still cool. And but we were talking about me being in ketosis and he was like, well, why are you doing that? You need the carbs to be able to get through the workout. I'm like, I can get through the workout just fine. I said, you know, I'm going to probably, and I did, when I, if I do a heavy deadlift session because I'm not relying on APT for energy, I huff and puff, I get exhausted because it's, you know, that exertion that I go through and a good set of ten on the deadlift is going to take me past thirty seconds.
[00:18:36.590] – Allan And so that is a struggle. Even exogenous ketones would not push me past that struggle.
[00:18:42.710] – Dr. Shemek Yeah.
[00:18:43.060] – Allan With the weight lifting, the way I was doing it, very heavy and I because it was very heavy, very slow. So you know, I understood that being in ketosis kind of put me at a disadvantage for that. But I could still push through every set. And I got really, really strong anyway because I also didn't have to deal with inflammation or any other things that were going on.
[00:19:02.870] – Dr. Shemek Yeah, and that's exactly true. You know, it's it really is. The bottom line is that Ketones really offer the average athlete, right, a lot of benefit. And like, you know, you just mentioned the inflammation, which we can get into in a little while if you want. It just but it gives you these these exogenous ketones, give you more energy, it mental clarity, focus, and we make our own. If you're on the ketogenic diet, we have endogenous ketones, meaning they come from within. Right. And so when you combine the two, it's really amazing what the amount of energy you have.
[00:19:42.630] – Dr. Shemek But I would venture to say that even though even if you were taking ketones with your power lifting, it helps you in some way because they really do help create more ATP within the mitochondria.
[00:19:55.010] – Allan Yeah, you know, and I would say if it was helping me with anything, it was the fact that my my total workout time was an hour and while it might had been in sprints. You know, dead lift and go, dead lift and go, you know, and then I'm breathing heavy. When I got into the lighter lifts later, I still had the energy and those were less like that. And so, yeah, I absolutely agree that it helped.
[00:20:17.780] – Allan But I actually think probably the best benefit and we'll get like I said, I do want to get into it is inflammation. Because every time we talk about a chronic disease, heart disease, cancer, you know, diabetes, you just, you know, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, you just keep going on and on and. They take you back to the beginning, in the beginning is chronic inflammation, and you called it silent inflammation and I actually like that because it's scarier.
[00:20:52.880] – Dr. Shemek It is, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:20:54.620] – Allan What what causes silent inflammation and how does the ketogenic diet help us address it?
[00:21:01.160] – Dr. Shemek So we have, I'll just start off by talking about the two different types of inflammation. And the first type is called acute inflammation. And it's not so cute because it hurts. It's uncomfortable. It's that sprang, black and blue swollen ankle. It's that cut on the finger. It's that terrible sunburn or awful head cold. Right? So that is acute inflammation. We need it in order to heal. Without it, we're sitting ducks. Really. So let's take that cut on the finger.
[00:21:31.910] – Dr. Shemek When you cut your finger, an enormous amount of inflammatory molecules are released. And soldiers, if you will, rush to the site to repair the wound. They repair the wound, the wound heals, the soldiers go away, the inflammation goes away and all is well. So that's acute inflammation. And, yes, we need it, even though it seems unreasonable because it doesn't feel good. But but we need it.
[00:21:56.970] – Dr. Shemek So then the next type of inflammation is silent or chronic inflammation. And the name silent really suggests danger, doesn't it, because we don't know it's there until the symptoms start to occur. And so 75 percent of all Americans are walking around with silent inflammation and don't even know it. It is really such a sad situation, really, but it is the core underlying cause of most illness, disease, faster aging and weight gain. And you can look at silent inflammation is like having a sore on the inside of your body that never heals unless you intervene.
[00:22:38.540] – Dr. Shemek And unlike acute inflammation, which emits just a trickle of inflammatory molecules, silent inflammation emits just acute inflammation emits an enormous amount. Silent inflammation emits just a trickle. Okay. And so you would think, well, this is better, right? And it isn't because it goes on 24/7 every single day, unbeknownst to you, where acute inflammation goes away. Once you're healed, it's gone. But sometimes the immune system goes, it becomes haywire. And this is what causes this over abundance, this overstimulation of the inflammatory pathways. And why it's called chronic inflammation is because it never goes away.
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[00:24:56.390] – Allan Now, whenever you bring up the ketogenic diet around someone that really hasn't heard about it or they've heard about it, but they've heard it's deadly, it's going to kill you, you shouldn't be doing that because that's the worst way to eat, because it doesn't buy into the fat is bad mantra. But the reality of it is that when we eat a ketogenic diet, it actually can help improve the ratios and the things that we should be most concerned about when we're talking about fat and cholesterol. Can you get into that?
[00:25:31.250] – Dr. Shemek Yes. And I'd also like to address the inflammation factor that at the ketogenic diet reduces inflammation in the body. It actually reverses inflammation. And that's because we are we are signaling NFR2, that is the master regulator of antioxidants signalling within the body. Right? And the ketogenic diet prevents the NLRP3 inflammasome from doing its dirty work within the cell. So it's just a very, very important way to eat. And a lot of people have misunderstood its benefits.
[00:26:16.250] – Dr. Shemek They hear the word ketosis and they think it's keto-acidosis, which is a very harmful effect that happens to people who have diabetes and go into a state of ketoacidosis. So it's much different. But yes. So the the fat and the cholesterol, all of that has really been misunderstood. In fact, the ketogenic diet improves HDL and triglycerides. And this, you know, this is due, the improved HDL is due to a reduction in triglycerides that are created within the liver, which is a really good thing.
[00:26:59.930] – Dr. Shemek You want a low triglyceride level for heart health. Right? Triglycerides really, really alert you to inflammation in your body. And if it's high, then you know that you need to do something different. And so they're an indication of your heart health as well. And there's the HDL triglyceride ratio that you can do to if it's one or under, you're good to go. If it's higher than than one, you need to do some work.
[00:27:34.850] – Dr. Shemek But there's also an increase in LDL, which happens to some people on the ketogenic diet. And it's but generally it's not the LPa form which is or can be the most harmful. So it's the big fluffy cholesterol that's roaming around versus the little ones, the little dense lipoproteins. So that that is part of the the reason that the ketogenic diet is so great for your heart health. And, you know, there's also the misunderstanding about people think the ketogenic diet is a high protein diet when in fact it's a moderate protein diet. And, you know, they're afraid of of eating eggs. They're afraid of saturated fat. And it's really sad because we've, you know, really, you found out that there was a researcher's, his name was Ancel Keys, and he did a seven country study and cherry picked the data.
[00:28:36.770] – Dr. Shemek Right. So blamed everything on saturated fat versus what really is causing the heart conditions. Heart disease with people we now know is the overconsumption of carbohydrates, especially refined sugar. And you know me, Allan, I really recommend people stop eating sugar. Eliminate it from your diet. And so it's the sugar, the process, simple carbohydrates, but it is not the saturated fat. In fact, there was a study I don't know if you recall, it was called a pure study.
[00:29:12.770] – Dr. Shemek It was published in The Lancet in 2017 and it studied over 135,000 people across 18 different countries. And it turned out that those who ate the least saturated fat had the highest amount of heart disease and mortality. And those who ate the most saturated fat, of course, then had the lowest rates of stroke and heart disease.
[00:29:37.370] – Dr. Shemek So right there, you know, you see it's a large study and you see the the correlation or the the amount of health with saturated fat. And so eggs were demonized and still are demonized, saturated fat is still demonized, but I think they're starting to come into their own. People are starting to understand and even reputable high ranking health experts in cardiology are saying, yep, you know, saturated fat is necessary for heart health, in fact. And and we do know that every time you take a bite of an inflammatory food, sugar, refined flours, etc, processed junk foods, crackers, cakes, cookies that you are eating, creating inflammation.
[00:30:30.720] – Dr. Shemek And that's unfortunately sad because what's happening is up from a cellular level, you are harming the mitochondria within the cell. The more mitochondria you have, the healthier they are, the healthier you are in every way. And so you see people who are older and frail. They have very little mitochondria going on, OK, they're not really healthy mitochondria. And so if you're tired all the time, that's a sign that maybe you need to start boosting your mitochondrial health, your cellular health.
[00:31:08.130] – Allan Yeah, unfortunately, the signal of fatigue is go eat some more sugar.
[00:31:14.950] – Dr. Shemek Yeah, exactly.
[00:31:15.160] – Allan So they actually get the opposite message out of that. Oh, if I, if I have some sugar I'll feel better, you know, and they yeah. They get the dopamine and they feel good but it's not really helping. And you know, I'm, I'm a perfect example of you know, when I check my cholesterol and triglycerides is when I'm in ketosis my HDL triglyceride ratio is off the charts. Good, even though my total cholesterol is high. So I'm one of those responders that, yes, my LDL goes up, but it only goes up about 30 points.
[00:31:50.950] But my triglycerides can can I can get them down to 50. But if I'm you know, when I'm in my low feasting mode and I'm drinking beer and eating what I want to eat, they'll usually pop up to 150, maybe even 200 if I'm not careful. And I can actually get my HDL higher than my triglycerides when I'm eating a strict ketogenic diet. So it really can help you improve your lipid profile if you're if your doctor doesn't lose their mind about what the total number and the the LDL number is, because that that seems to be their focus more so than than triglycerides and the HDL.
[00:32:33.190] – Dr. Shemek Yeah, it's true and you know, and a lot of people panic when, you know, I have family members calling me up and saying, Lori, my LDL is really high, it's 250 and they want to put me on statins. And, you know, it's that's it's really important for the patient to look at the numbers, the breakdown of the type of cholesterol. And that has been a big myth as well. So we're learning so much about heart health and what what produces a healthy heart. And so if you take anything away from this show, it should be that, you know that saturated fat is not going to hurt you. Now, if you are in, if you're 10% of the population who has a genetic condition that doesn't clear cholesterol from the body and cannot, then that's another issue.
[00:33:29.590] – Dr. Shemek But that's 10 percent. So it's really important to make sure you're not you will you will know when you get your blood test if you are or not, it will be sky high. I mean, it won't be your typical high number. But again, if you take anything away from this show, make sure that you stop eating sugar, eliminate added sugars from your diet and refined junk foods that we spoke about earlier, because that is the key to optimal health in many cases.
[00:34:00.860] – Allan One of the areas that, and I'm going to admit I'm confused when it comes to ketosis, because there's two there's two concepts, OK, so on one hand, a lot of people are looking at ketosis as a potential protocol to help with cancer treatment. They're not saying it can cure cancer or perhaps even prevent cancer, but particularly the cancers that rely on glucose. If you're keeping your overall blood sugar, you know, in control and you're doing ketosis, that will slow the growth of the cancer.
[00:34:37.130] – Allan And then I go on the other side of the conversation and I say, OK, an individual that's trying to perform long distance athletic performance. Is this still going to be burning glucose and glycogen, so like where I went on a trip, you know, went on a run or a walk and I'm you know, I'm a 1000 calories in now, the human body can carry about 2000 calories.
[00:35:02.360] – Allan But for my body to keep going, maybe even further, which people do you know they go hundreds of miles, it's crazy, but they do. And that but their body and they do it while they're in ketosis. So there's something happening there where our body is taking what it gets out of fat and it's turning it into blood sugar. And ketones, because we still kind of need both, your blood sugar is not going to zero is staying fairly stable, so we are producing some glycogen from somewhere, some glucose from somewhere, because at some point it burns out, it would burn out the muscles.
[00:35:40.230] – Allan And so Ketones are producing the APT, but I guess I'm losing it as is if our if our body can produce with, say, zero carb, our body could still produce and keep our blood sugar stable. So when we're breaking down fat, we create the glysol, I guess its a black hole and we produce the ketone. So I guess I'm trying I'm having a hard time balancing those two things out to say that, yes, you're going to have enough sugar in your blood and in your muscles and in your liver for the athletic performance. But then it's also going to slow the growth of cancer because you're going to have less sugar. You understand what I'm saying?
[00:36:22.680] – Dr. Shemek I do. I understand exactly what you're saying. And so what happens a lot of times is that the body is able we always have some glucose in storage in the liver. We always have it, you know, for those emergency situations and also to, the body can break down muscle for glucose as needed if it wants it. Right? So that's that. And then in terms of the the you know, the cancer and the sugar, you know, one theory is that cancer feeds on the sugar that you eat and a high fat diet, like the ketogenic diet starves as tumors.
[00:37:01.720] – Dr. Shemek OK, and but one thing is for sure that you are with ketones in the mix, you are definitely balancing you're creating cellular homeostasis. Right? You're balancing your blood sugar. The insulin is low. And but yet you still have the the ability to make glucose within the body and it stores, glycogen within the liver and can be can be used for any type of situation necessary. Does that help?
[00:37:34.380] – Allan Yeah, it does. I guess the question is it sounds bad whenever you say burn muscle for energy. I always thought that the ketogenic diet was muscle sparing. Well, so this, it has the ability to do it, whether no matter, you know, whether you're on a ketogenic diet or not, so it's called Gluconeogenesis and the body is able to utilize glucose by breaking down muscle, if that makes sense.
[00:38:04.600] – Allan Yeah. OK.
[00:38:05.380] – Dr. Shemek So, yeah no matter what.
[00:38:06.850] – Allan If I chose to do these long distance things, I'm going to probably sacrifice some muscle along the way.
[00:38:16.180] – Dr. Shemek Gluconeogenesis occurs.
[00:38:17.260] – Allan And when I get past that point where, you know, I've used up my liver and muscle glycogen and my brain's going to still want a steady supply of blood sugar, at some level, it's not going to let you.
[00:38:31.390] – Dr. Shemek And if you're fat adapted your metabolic metabolically flexible, then you can do either, OK. You can use your body can utilize glycogen, it can utilize fat for fuel, your own fat stores for fuel, dietary fat. So that's what, you know, we didn't mention. But that's what ketosis is, is your body takes dietary fat and your own fat stores breaks them down in the liver and it produces ketones. And one main ketone that I mentioned early on is called beta hydroxybutyrate BHB that produces all the magic, if you will, of the ketogenic diet. So, yeah.
[00:39:17.050] – Allan Those are those are the ketones you're going to measure in your blood. So they're the ones that we used.
[00:39:22.330] – Dr. Shemek Right.
[00:39:22.390] – Allan We're breathing out, you know, in our breath, you can you can measure those out of the breath and then of course. And I forget the other one, but there's urine strips that pick up that that third one, I'm forgetting, I'm drawing a blank on the name of the third. But, you know, so that's how we're measuring those. And yeah, the one what's in the blood is what gets you. So.
[00:39:42.030] – Dr. Shemek That's right. The BHB is the most important one. Yeah.
[00:39:47.560] – Dr. Shemek Now, you talked about intermittent fasting, and as I said earlier, I, you know, just I just fall into these things. I did paleo and because I was eating relatively low carb, I didn't realize that I fell into ketosis the first time and realized what was happening. It was wonderful because in Paleo I lost 25 pounds and then in keto, I lost another 35.
[00:40:09.290] – Dr. Shemek Wow.
[00:40:10.020] – Allan So it was, you know, so boom. Yeah, it's just awesome. Over 11 months, you know, I knew something was going on. My breath was stinking and I was losing a lot of weight. And I was like, this is interesting. So I found out what ketosis was. That's how I actually discovered ketosis. And then, you know, I just naturally started getting into intermittent fasting because I wake up in the morning and I forget to eat because my body was using my body fat to keep me going.
[00:40:37.450] – Dr. Shemek And you were satiated.
[00:40:39.310] – Allan Oh, completely. Completely. And I tell the story, I, I got up one morning and I went out to my property to do some work. I had this, had some acreage in Florida and I had some ponds on it. So I went out there to clear and do some work and I worked out there pretty, pretty hard clearing the land work with, you know, what a sling blade is to cut down weeds and grass and such. I was using the sling blade and going for a few hours.
[00:41:02.250] – Dr. Shemek Wow.
[00:41:02.680] – Allan I said, OK, I'm going to go ahead. I did have a tractor out there to mow it down after I beat it down. And so then I get on the tractor and I cut a few things down. Then I take the tractor back up on my trailer and I still came to haul this thing home to my actual house. And I say I'm going to haul this out of here and my truck got stuck in my front yard of my property.
[00:41:23.000] – Allan And I was like, this is ridiculous. I can't get out. So I had to call AAA. Well, AAA shows up and they the truck breaks while they're trying to pull me out. And so it was four hours later when they got the part, got everything fixed and got me out of the mud. So there's like I'm rolling on about six o'clock and I'm realizing I haven't eaten in 24 hours.
[00:41:44.680] – Dr. Shemek Oh my goodness.
[00:41:45.760] – Allan I didn't even think about it. You know, while he was out at his truck, I went fishing and I just sat there.
[00:41:51.070] – Dr. Shemek Isn't that amazing? That's a really great example.
[00:41:52.790] – Allan Yeah, I didn't catch anything but.
[00:41:53.530] – Dr. Shemek A lot of people mean a lot of people are afraid not to eat. And that's that's it's really a it's a headset, it's a mindset, if you will. Because, you know, we've all not eaten. Intermittent fasting is simply not eating for a period of time. However long you want that time to be is is just fine. But the problem is most Americans are eating 24/7. We eat breakfast. We have snacks sometimes all the time.
[00:42:24.190] – Dr. Shemek We have lunch, snacks, dinner, snacks, dessert until we go to bed. Right. That's not the way the human body was designed to evolve. The human body was designed on intermittent fasting, actually. So during those periods of time when you're not eating is when all the magic happens because this gives the body time to do the things, the cellular clean up, if you will, that it normally can't do while it's processing your food. It's the digestive process takes up a lot of energy, most of the energy outside of brain function in the body.
[00:43:01.480] – Dr. Shemek And so when we don't eat this, this allows ourselves to go into cleanup mode. And it's called autophagy, and that's cellular housekeeping, essentially. It breaks down things, it's autophagy really mean self-heating, meaning that it can, you know, get rid of dying cells, it can remodel cellular parts. It can just really improve mitochondrial health, which we talked about before. And for those of you that don't know what mitochondria are or don't remember, they're little tiny organelles in the cells of our body that are crucial and vital not only to keep us alive, but to keep us healthy as well.
[00:43:45.670] – Dr. Shemek So as we age these little organelles, these mitochondria, they begin to falter. They begin to lose their robustness, their health, and we lose a number of them. This just happens naturally as we age, right? Unless we intervene and do something about it. Well, intermittent fasting does this. The healthier you are, the better mitochondrial health you have. An intermittent fasting does is the ketogenic diet does this. Exogenous ketones, supplemental ketones do this. And exercise does this very effectively as well.
[00:44:21.900] – Dr. Shemek So those are the four options you have and that I talk about in my book, the Ketogenic Key to get into ketosis, and that's what you want. So intermittent fasting is an easy way because if you don't like the ketogenic diet and you don't like to go very low carb, which, by the way, is 50 grams or less, 25 grams or less for even deeper ketosis, you don't have to. You can do intermittent fasting and then eat your your carbs later. OK, so that's what is so wonderful about intermittent fasting. Why I'm such a big fan of it.
[00:44:57.160] – Allan Yeah. Now one of the things I did have a question about is because I was interviewing someone else and he mentioned fasting and autophagy and we got into it and his his opinion, I guess I haven't really seen any science on it is that intermittent fasting wasn't long enough to actually create autophagy that you had to really kind of be fasting two or more days before you'd really start to see those benefits. But so does intermittent fasting really get us that far?
[00:45:30.910] – Dr. Shemek Intermittent fasting does. And so you're you are, you go into some autophagy while you sleep for eight hours. There's some. You do if you if you desire to fast for you know, you extend your breakfast, say by two hours, you're still you're going to incorporate more of it. But the sweet spot is really about 16 to 18 hours is when autophagy kicks in. But he's talking about deep autophagy. When you get into deep autophagy, this literally resets your metabolism.
[00:46:04.990] – Dr. Shemek It resets your cellular health. So if you fast for 24 hours or longer, then you're really doing a great benefit for your body. But I don't recommend doing it more, you know, 48 hours or more, very often, once a month, maybe at the most, because you don't want to stress your body too much. It is a hormedic stressor, as it's referred to. And so you, you know, having a daily 12 hour, 16 hour fast is just fine. And then once in a while, doing the longer fasting.
[00:46:42.970] – Allan Yeah. You know, I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting, but I always, always tell people if you're wanting to do something more extended, you need to you need to be talking to a doctor, particularly if you're on meds.
[00:46:53.680] – Dr. Shemek Agree completely!
[00:46:53.720] – Allan And if you're going to try the ketogenic diet and you're on metformin to control your blood sugar. You're on insulin. You know, this is going to help with your metabolic syndrome and your insulin resistance. But at the same time, you have to let your doctor know this is going on because this is going to change your blood sugar.
[00:47:13.950] – Dr. Shemek Yeah.
[00:47:14.860] – Allan Your medications are going to they're going to have to change and you have to be able to adjust to that. So when you're going to do something like this, the health benefits are huge. And when you're cutting inflammation down, when you're getting your blood sugar under control, you know, a lot of my clients, I'll get them down to start to start lowering their sugars. Let's just cut the sugar down. Nothing crazy. Just a little bit here, a little bit there.
[00:47:38.160] – Allan And they're you know, they're watching their their overall blood sugar go down. They're like, oh, I need to call my doctor and get my metformin dose changed. And then, sure enough, they get on the doctor's like, what are you doing? I just changing what I'm eating, keep doing it, you know, because it's working.
[00:47:53.740] – Dr. Shemek And that's part of intermittent fasting as you are, you're creating ketones. And it really is a superior fuel compared to glucose. And once you start using this fuel and your body becomes used to eating and using glucose and using your own fat or creating ketones, you will markedly you will feel the difference big time. So many people were relying on the toxic Western diet, which again is is highly processed with refined food, which is really an inflammatory diet. The keto diet focuses on eating very few grams of carbohydrates and eating more healthy fat. Right? And some protein.
[00:48:40.470] – Dr. Shemek And intermittent fasting, which keeps, by the way, keeps insulin low and glucose low. But intermittent fasting flattens insulin and flattens glucose. And again, when there are no digestive processes essentially going on that the cells have to worry about, then the cellular inflammation begins to heal. It begins, the tissues begin to heal. You, you know, you have there's something called cell danger response that happens to people. If this inflammation becomes overwhelming to the body and the brain senses it. The mitochondria senses it, the cells around the in the body sense it.
[00:49:25.950] – Dr. Shemek So when the brain gets the message that you've turned off this type of inflammation, the cell danger response or CDR, then things heal within the body. So it's really a wonderful tool to actually heal yourself.
[00:49:44.340] – Allan Dr. Lori, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
[00:49:54.150] – Dr. Shemek Just three. OK.
[00:49:58.550] – Allan Just give them something until they get the book, OK?
[00:50:00.860] – Dr. Shemek OK. So I think it's crucial to keep inflammation low, as we've been talking about throughout. And we do this by being very proactive and mindful of every single choice we have the opportunity to make. Right. And I underscore the word opportunity. So I would say living in antiinflammatory lifestyle, whether it's with the ketogenic diet or a Mediterranean type diet, will boost your health span and your life span, which in and of itself generates a really a better quality of life for you.
[00:50:36.680] – Dr. Shemek And so I think that is, you know, when you are living without excess inflammation, we want a little bit because we want to be protected. Right. We want ourselves to be on guard. But we we don't want it to be an excess, which, as I mentioned earlier, 75 percent of our population is walking around with. And so it affects your mindset, your mental well-being, your fitness, your ability to move and and function freely and easily, and your health span, your immune system is all up regulated.
[00:51:10.010] – Dr. Shemek So it's a really I think it's really important. So you want to remove excess carb intake, you want to use nutrients as well for to target specific situations, such as increasing mitochondrial density, like the supplement P2Q with your doctor's approval and you want to keep inflammation low. So exercise is another is another option, which is one of the most underutilized ways to increase mitochondrial health and uses as an antidepressant even. My two cents.
[00:51:49.410] – Allan Thank you, Dr. Lori.
[00:51:50.730] – Dr. Shemek You're very welcome.
[00:51:50.820] – Allan If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, the Ketogenic Key, where would you like for me to send them?
[00:51:58.830] – Dr. Shemek I would love for your listeners to go to Amazon. On Amazon, you'll find all my books there, including this last one called the Ketogenic Key, and I think you'll find it a wonderful tool to help optimize your health and life as well.
[00:52:15.890] – Allan You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/453, and I'll be sure to have the links to the books there. Dr. Lori, thank you for being a part of 40+ fitness.
[00:52:25.900] – Dr. Shemek Thank you so much. Really. It's been fun.
[00:52:32.110] – Allan All right, Rachel, now you're one of the neat people that does endurance running and you do keto, that used to not be a thing. We used to carb up the night before, you know, how much pasta can you shove in your mouth. You get up in the morning and you make sure you're still eating carbs and you carry carbs with you in these little packets. Or when it first came out it was these bars that were really hard to chew when your mouth was dry.
[00:53:02.950] – Rachael So true.
[00:53:03.910] – Allan But you're able to do endurance work and not have to worry so much with fuel.
[00:53:11.590] – Rachael That's true. I've been keto for about two years now, a little over two years now, and it's helped my endurance quite a bit. I can tell you I could probably run 15 miles, fasted, well just on a cup of coffee. I drink coffee every morning no matter what, but I think the longest I've gone without needing any fuel has been 15 miles. But I don't do that on a regular basis. On a long run day I will eat something before I go out. But that's been one of the huge benefits of keto is not relying on a constant sugar load throughout a long day.
[00:53:51.930] – Allan Yeah. And, you know, we talked about exogenous ketones and other things that you can use. So there are some strategies that you can put into it. But and I think I've said this before, if you're if you're going to try a strategy for a race, do it on your long runs practices, practice.
[00:54:08.550] – Rachael That's right. Absolutely.
[00:54:09.930] – Allan Make sure your body is going to react the way you want to. Yeah, I'm good to go for a good long time with without fuel. That fasted walk I did on Monday. I mean, the 13 mile walk on Monday. I did it completely fasted.
[00:54:23.800] – Rachael Wow.
[00:54:25.270] – Allan You know, when I came home, I took a nap because I was, you know, roughly I was going from about eight o'clock in the morning until close to noon by the time I stopped sweating and got a shower. And then I just went ahead and took a little nap about an hour or so, got a good sleep cycle in, and then, boom, I'm bouncing up, ready to eat and feeling like I earned it.
[00:54:47.140] – Rachael Fantastic. Isn't that incredible?
[00:54:49.720] – Allan Yeah.
[00:54:49.900] – Rachael That is something.
[00:54:51.250] – Allan And so, you know, I had I had kind of fallen off of the the wagon, I guess, as you will. I Normally do, a seasonal ketosis. And I'm just going to have an episode on that coming up in a couple of weeks. A few weeks, a couple of weeks, I guess. And, you know, I will normally go into a famine mode for this time of year around February. So I would have started around February. But with the pandemic and the stress and everything that was going on around that time, you know, like closing my gym and hoping I'd get to reopen it, just not knowing a lot of things, I didn't I kept feasting and put on the covid 15, you know.
[00:55:29.410] – Allan So now we're going into the period of time when I would normally go into a feasting season, but I'm not ready to do that right now. I have lost all the weight and some. I'm back down to my fighting weight, what I normally run at during my my famine season. But I want to I want to push it a little bit further. And so I'm actually not going to to do what I normally do. I'm actually going to try to go through this next period and stay in ketosis.
[00:55:57.070] – Allan And it'll be a challenge and probably a podcast episode about how to travel in keto, because I'm going to be traveling back to the States. It looks like they're going to be opening things up here to let us travel home and back, but they keep changing the rules so we won't really know till we get on the plane what we're supposed to do and hope that we did it right. But, yeah, I mean, I try to do the holiday season in the United States traveling around and try to make sure I stay in ketosis that time.
[00:56:26.050] – Allan So food choices will be a tough selection, you know, just because there's a lot of foods that come out in the fall that we just really, really tend to enjoy and want. And many times they don't really fit our eating style.
[00:56:42.150] – Rachael That's right. And it's hard to eat out unless you know the menu really well. It would be a good experiment. And looking forward to hearing what you experience with that.
[00:56:51.640] – Allan Well, like everything it comes down to being prepared, you know, plan, plan, plan and plan some more. Have strategies. You know, if there's a food that you just love and it's the fall food and, you know, you're just going to want some of it, you have a strategy for it. So, you know, I'm going to make sure I carry some food with me. You know, when I go into a restaurant, there'll be a certain way that I'll order.
[00:57:16.680] – Allan Sticking to the protein and, you know, vegetables that aren't coated in sugar, you know, and then and then with my mom, you know, it's like we do a meal. It's like I'll just go ahead and do some of the cooking. So I'll make a keto cranberry sauce because I love cranberry sauce and I'll do the chicken. I mean, the turkey and make sure it's a little bit more fatty cut the way I cook it. So it's going to be a little bit more fat added to it, which will make it juicy and delicious. And then you were saying, you know, we're getting into, I guess, the pumpkin spice season. I'm not I'm not that kind of person. I'm a black drinker. I just trained myself that way as when I was getting off of the diet sodas. But you found a recipe that you're pretty eager to give a shot.
[00:58:06.060] – Rachael Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the pumpkin spice, but I do love cinnamon and nutmeg. And this fall season, when the weather gets crisp, I actually do like to add a dash of cinnamon to my coffee, but I will be making some keto snickerdoodle muffins later on this afternoon. I found this recipe from Kirbie's Cravings and I've tried it several times and even my non-keto family members enjoy it as well. So it's a really nice fall treat.
[00:58:35.280] – Allan Well, good. Well, we'll have a link in the show notes so you can find that. Just scan to the back of the show notes section and we will be sure to make sure that a link to that recipe is there.
[00:58:46.290] – Rachael Absolutely. Yep.
[00:58:47.650] – Allan Cool. All right. So Dr. Lori is a really cool person. I've known her for a while. I was actually on her podcast years ago. And, you know, so glad to see her out and writing this book because it was I think it was an awesome book. And I really enjoyed the conversation with her because I think, you know. We don't equate keto with much in the athletic field, we think of it in terms of, oh, I want to lose weight or oh, I've got diabetes and therefore I need to cut my sugar and then keto gets the bad rap, you know? And it's partially I think it's partially deserved because the initial people that were pushing keto kept talking about bacon.
[00:59:31.450] – Rachael Yes.
[00:59:32.400] – Allan You know, and I'm like, it's not the bacon diet. Stop the bacon. You know, it's not the bacon. Bacon's fine, it's a condiment. It's something you have with your eggs. Eggs is the main entree. And then the bacon just happens to be something you have on the side. Don't fill your plate up with bacon and then have a couple, a little bit of egg. It's that's not the way this is supposed to work. That's wrong. But, you know, I think people are upset with, you know, they don't know because they've been told for decades to stay away from the saturated fat that it's going to kill you. But the science is coming out now is un-refutable. It's the sugar that's killing it.
[01:00:09.700] – Rachael Yes. And that was part of your discussion with Lori that I really enjoyed, was that it's not the bacon and egg diet, but that's getting into ketosis involves a little bit of diet and exercise, some intermittent fasting and the Exogenous ketones. So it's not just the bacon diet and there's a lot more to it and it has a lot of benefits.
[01:00:36.130] – Allan Yeah. And I'd say if you're looking at it as a protocol. So first we're talking about diabetes or we're talking about Alzheimer's or epilepsy and those types of things then I do think there's a good place for the endogenous ketones. But just like I'll say with supplements, just like I'll say with medications, same thing with this. That's not food. You know, it's not what your body needs. We don't have a ketone deficiency because our body is going to make the ketones and eventually our body is going to learn how to use the ketones.
[01:01:09.760] – Allan So if you're giving it more ketones than you use and you need, you're just going to pee them out. So, yes, you can spend thirty dollars to get the high end ketone little drinks that you can get on Amazon. They're little over thirty dollars for a two or three ounce bottle. You can get the ones that clear the salts that aren't quite as high octane and you can pay seven or eight bucks for about a two or three ounce thing of that, and they make them delicious.
[01:01:37.510] – Allan So that tastes great. Now, they were horrible, horrible in the beginning, but they taste better now. You don't have a deficiency now if you're in an extreme endurance athlete. So you're looking at saying, OK, I need to make sure that I have fuel for this marathon or this ultra. And you're concerned that, you know, yeah, your body's not going to be able to burn enough body fat because maybe you just don't feel like you have that much body fat to burn. Then there's a place for them and you can factor that in.
[01:02:06.950] – Allan But just recognize that you're investing in your performance and you need to know that they're working for you and then you're not just wasting your money. So I know there's people who are huge fans of them. It was interesting that Dr. Lori was a fan because she's not selling them, you know.
[01:02:26.910] – Rachael Yes.
[01:02:27.260] – Allan The fans, most of the big touting fans are the ones that are actually making them and they'll tell you how wonderful they are. But that's that's anything. Any supplement, anything. But the guy making it loves it.
[01:02:40.000] – Rachael Yeah. For you. But there's a time and a place and as an endurance athlete myself, you know, if I have a rest day, my nutritional needs are going to be far different from when I'm on my long run day. So if I'm running 20 or 30 miles, I need way more nutrition and fuel as well as hydration that I would maybe on a rest day or just a day at the gym or something. So, yeah, there's a time and a place for all these different things.
[01:03:08.910] – Allan Yeah. And I again, I look at exogenous ketones and I can't help but kind of lump them in with the term biohacking, you know, how do we hack this, how do we had that. And the human body was not meant to be hacked. It was it was meant to be treated well, nurtured and babied and given what it actually needs on a regular basis. When you're doing that, you've made up 95 percent of you being optimal.
[01:03:34.790] – Allan And then these other little things you can do, you know, be at Infra-Red, be it taking glutathione or exigence ketones or any of those things. They're a little incremental steps past that now. Yes. If you're trying to take a minute off your marathon time. Yeah. Something like that might help, but you've got to be doing that other 95 percent first.
[01:03:56.420] – Rachael For sure, yeah, we got to put the work in, get the muscles ready. Yeah, there's a lot to it than just what you're going to eat or drink that day.
[01:04:03.550] – Allan Yeah it's not like I'm just going to go and take some endogenous ketones and run a marathon, you know. It's just not going to happen. I can definitely walk a half right now, but I could probably jog or run a half if I put my mind to it. But
[01:04:17.680] – Rachael I'm sure.
[01:04:18.620] – Allan But you know, I'm not going to just sit there and start taking a supplement or taking something like this and becoming a super athlete.
[01:04:25.590] – Rachael Right.
[01:04:26.120] – Allan But, you know, just the cool thing about keto and it's just something to pay attention to is the science is coming out and there's more and more of it that you can use ketosis as a protocol to cut down the inflammation. And I think that's the core of it. What is getting us sick is the food and the things we're doing to our body. It's creating inflammation.
[01:04:49.350] – Rachael Absolutely.
[01:04:50.810] – Allan The more we can heal our body by getting the proper rest, stress management, diet, exercise, the more we can get ourselves in balance in pretty much those four areas. And then relationships and family and everything else just, you know, get all of that balanced out and working for you and you're going to make up that 95 percent.
[01:05:09.920] – Allan And then at that point, you can make some decisions if you want to do the tweaking and and twisting of knobs and just, you know, play mad scientist with your body. And then that's when it makes sense.
[01:05:20.480] – Rachael Yeah, absolutely. I was resistant to try the ketogenic diet initially, but about three years ago I had a pretty bad ankle injury and I had a tendonosis. I had this inflamed tendon, and I was researching everything I could do to get my ankle back in the shape and the more I read about the ketogenic diet and reducing that inflammation, I thought, well, what's the what's the harm? I give it a try and see how it goes. And two years later, I'm still doing it and feeling better.
[01:05:56.600] – Allan Yeah. And you know, the core reason I do seasonal ketosis is the reason a lot of people don't do ketosis at all. Those of them say, oh, it's unsustainable. You know, I like beer. You know, and if I have a beer or two beers, I'm going to fall out of ketosis. And if I'm doing that, you know, a few times a week as I'm, you know, going to football games and watching football, because, you know, of course, there's a football game on Sunday, there's a football game on Monday, there's a football game on Thursday, then there's another one on Friday, then there's one on Saturday.
[01:06:29.510] – Allan And let's start the week all over again. I'm going to have a few beers during the season. Well, I guess I'm not this season, but normally I would. And then we roll right on into Thanksgiving or, you know, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and all the parties in between New Year's Eve. And then my birthday is right around the same week as the Super Bowl. So we just roll and, you know, roll into that part of the year.
[01:06:54.770] Allan That's just too much for me to sit there and constantly tell myself, no, no, it's it just feels restricted. And that's the reason a lot of people fail at diets as diets are restrictive. But if you have a program like ketosis and you know how you're going to manage it and when you're in it and you're not completely tied in the fact that you're ketones, have to measure one measure, one point five every time you do it, then it becomes a really good, easy, sustainable way to eat and you get this huge amount of freedom.
[01:07:25.290] Allan Because like you said, you go on a long training run, you don't have to carry three pack packets of Guu with you.
[01:07:31.440] That's right. You can just go do the run, you know, have a little bit before and just go do the run. And when you get done, all you have to really worry about on the run was hydration.
[01:07:41.440] Mm hmm. Yeah, absolutely.
[01:07:42.440] They don't have to do all this extra stuff, you know, stop at a fast-food restaurant along the way just to get it right.
[01:07:51.270] Rachel It does give me a lot of freedom, but it's also for me, it's still an easy way of eating. And and you mentioned Thanksgiving. It's it's my favorite eating day of the year. I love everything having to do with Thanksgiving. And my parents and my husband, they're always they're fantastic cooks. But we have had Thanksgiving the last two years and it's been just as delicious as as any other Thanksgiving meal I've ever had. So, I mean, it's totally possible to still eat the foods you love, just making them a little bit more healthier than normal.
[01:08:27.390] Allan Cool. Well, I'm going to I'm going to challenge you. OK, we're coming up. You know, this is we're going into this this fall season and we're coming up on the Thanksgiving season soon. So why don't we do an episode where we where we're at the end of an episode where we do keto recipes, we drop a couple Thanksgiving keto recipes on folks so they'll have some things they can fall back on.
[01:08:50.740] Rachel Absolutely. That would. Great.
[01:08:52.740] Allan So that's my challenge. Get your favorite Keto recipe together for Thanksgiving or one or two of them. And then once we get into October, November, we'll start sharing some of those recipes.
[01:09:53.820] Rachel Sounds great. I'm on it.
[01:09:06.300] Allan Well, let's just say goodbye and we'll talk next week.
Patreons
The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:
This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Reel Paper. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/tp and use the discount code 40plus to get 25% off. Thank you for supporting the show by checking out this wonderful company.
Let's Say Hello
On this episode, we're introducing a co-host for the 40+ Fitness Podcast.
Rachel Everett is joining the wellness industry as a newly minted NASM Certified Personal Trainer. So, you'll find a preamble at the beginning of each episode and a wrap up at the end. With 450 episodes done, I felt this would be a great way to freshen things up.
Please join us on the 40+ Fitness Facebook Group at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group to welcome her to the podcast.
[00:02:53.360] – Allan Rachel, how are you doing.
[00:02:56.130] – Rachel Great! How are you Allan.
[00:02:57.160] – Allan Doing really good. I'm excited to have you on as a new co-host to the show. So everybody say welcome to Rachel.
[00:03:04.670] – Rachel Well, Hi and thank you so much. It's an honor. I've been your biggest fan for quite a while, so it's a real treat for me. Thanks for inviting me on.
[00:03:12.740] – Allan Yeah, Rachel and I have been friends for a good long time. We met through my wife and one of the cool facts about Rachel and her husband Mike is that their birthdays are exactly one day apart. So they're celebrating for a full 48 hours every year. It's pretty cool to be at one of those celebrations, especially when you're there at midnight with them. When it crosses over.
[00:03:36.110] – Allan I forget you're you're actually one day your birthday is the one day before.
[00:03:41.180] – Rachel I'm the after.
[00:03:43.190] – Allan Oh, okay. Oh yeah.
[00:03:44.410] – Rachel Mike is the old man.
[00:03:45.350] – Allan Okay, yeah, Mike is the old man, although he's lost a lot of weight and he looks years younger. Well cutting off the beard health too.
[00:03:54.250] – Rachel Yes it did. Yeah.
[00:03:58.160] – Allan Well, go ahead.
[00:03:59.590] – Rachel Oh, he's been working real hard this year. He's been putting in a ton of miles, his running has been epic. And he's and it's led to a ton of weight loss. He's been doing real great.
[00:04:10.160] – Allan So how's your week been?
[00:04:12.660] – Rachel Good. Little nutty. The kids are back to college, so I've got one in college and staying at college and my other one is home doing the online classes. So it's just it's been kind of crazy, although they do their own thing, they're getting set up for what you know, in class and online learning. It's just been kind of nutty with all the covid procedures that the school has in place. But they're doing great.
[00:04:38.270] – Allan Well, good. Well, I've been focused on my miles. You know, I talked about in an earlier episode that I'm doing my famine season. And I started actually June 1st. I think in the episode I may have said May 1st, but I've actually lost twenty-five pounds as we record this since that start June 1st. And it's basically, you know, using ketosis, intermittent fasting and just enjoying good long walks, getting sunshine, looking at the beach, and listening to some audiobooks and podcasts.
[00:05:10.490] – Allan So, you know, I think I've done twenty-seven miles this week.
[00:05:15.490] – Rachel Wow.
[00:05:15.860] – Allan You know, and unfortunately, I RunKeeper fell out on me apparently when I stopped to take a picture or selfie, it decides, oh, he stopped and I just paused this here. And if I don't remember to reset and start it. So you get down the road and you're like, I don't hear my little lady telling me how I'm doing.
[00:05:31.160] – Rachel That's right.
[00:05:31.610] – Allan And then I realized I just walked two miles without her telling me anything. So now that's not going to show up. So my winning my championship or my fastest ten-mile walk or whatever is just not going to be on that app. So that's the frustration. So now I started a spreadsheet, so I'll keep up with myself, dammit.
[00:05:50.700] – Rachel Yeah, technology, it's so awesome, but it can also be just as frustrating.
[00:05:54.710] – Allan It can be. So let me introduce our guest today.
Interview
Our guest today is one of the most famous and successful cosmetic dermatologists in the world. Often called the beauty guru by his celebrity and international patients, renowned for his minimally invasive techniques and holistic approach to cosmetic rejuvenation and age management. He is regularly featured as a skin and aging expert in local and international media. As a board-certified dermatologist, he has lectured around the world and has authored several articles on both consumer and professional literature. He is a clinical assistant professor of dermatology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital.
With no further ado, here's Dr Paul Jarrod Frank.
Transcript
[00:06:38.530] – Allan Dr. Frank, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:06:41.190] – Dr. Frank Hey, how are you?
[00:06:42.810] – Allan So I got your book and I was really glad to have an opportunity to read it, because as I get into my mid 50s, aging has become this this thing that I pay a lot more attention to these days. The book is called The Pro Aging Playbook: Embracing a Lifestyle of Beauty and Wellness Inside and Out. And I have to say that your approach to this is really refreshing because sometimes, you think, okay, this guy makes his living by making people look and feel younger.
That's what this book is going to really be about, is just let's sell some more plastic surgery. But it was absolutely not. And I was really, really glad to see that.
[00:07:26.050] – Dr. Frank Well, I mean, listen, I've been doing this 20 years now, and I find the greatest way to predict the greatest cosmetic result has to do before you even do the procedure. It's just in the talk and gaining a feel of someone's perspective and feeling about aging and all the other things they do. So to me, what I've learned most in 20 years is not how to use the syringes and the lasers and all the things, but the most impactful thing is to learn how people think about aging and how I could help them think about it and then give them all the wonderful options we have now. It's not a bad thing aging, is it?
[00:08:01.030] – Allan Well, no, but if you do it right.
[00:08:03.890] – Dr. Frank If you do it right. I mean, listen, we weren't meant to live probably past the average age of 30 up until the last 50 to 100 years. So I think if we start with the idea that aging is a blessing, I think that's a good way to find ways to become the best version of yourself.
[00:08:25.030] – Allan And this is you pulling out your psychology degree and using it, because it really does help here. And one of the things that I think is as I've gotten older, I've become much more aware of the words that we use and how that impacts our feelings, our lives, our emotions, our successes and failures. You prefer to use the term pro aging versus anti aging.
[00:08:48.640] – Dr. Frank Yeah, and you know, anti aging, that's a word that immediately has a negative connotation. And it was created as a marketing tool. Right, this is started back decades, generations ago with selling creams and lotions and potions and things that are anti as if aging is a bad thing. And I think starting out from that that type of perspective is that type of negative thinking that we were just talking about. I think pro aging makes people feel more positive. It makes it look like less of a chore and more of something that you can embrace.
[00:09:27.130] – Dr. Frank And hopefully I could teach people how to live a lifestyle, a pro aging lifestyle to bring all those things together. And we're lucky now. We live in a world where we have so many options, not just to keep us alive, but to make us look and feel good.
[00:09:39.760] – Allan And so go a little deeper into when you say pro-aging, exactly what that means.
[00:09:45.640] – Dr. Frank Well, I think it's a culmination of a lot of different things. Again, people think of the word anti aging. They think of like creams and procedures and all these things. But when I think of pro aging, I'm thinking of a lifestyle that involves a lot of forms of grooming. And to me, grooming can be exercise, the way you choose your meals, the way you choose your friends and the people who are positive and negative in your world, and how you choose lasers to get rid of sun damage if you choose lasers or other surgical procedures or things like that.
[00:10:18.070] – Dr. Frank Pro aging is really a combination of grooming techniques. And I think one of the things I'm noticing more since when I started in the late 90s, is that because of technology and the access across socioeconomic groups and because of the technology, there's less and less. but basically these things are becoming so much more acceptable. When I was a kid, rich, only rich people had gym memberships, let alone had facial plastic surgery. And now the younger generation looks at joining a gym, having a nutritionist, having a life coach, getting a little Botox.
[00:10:53.090] – Dr. Frank These are all forms of grooming. They're accepted. And to me, this is all part of the kind of pro aging lifestyle that I think people are now embracing and breaking those anti aging stigmas that they used to have. The ladies at lunch do procedures or vain people do these type of things.
[00:11:13.520] – Allan Now, you use this title for for the bad things we do to ourselves that involve aging maybe faster or at least looking older than we are. When you use it, I immediately in my head had this concept of this Legion of doom, you know, these these these evil-doers, these these terrible the anti-heroes, you know, the villains. And you called it the extrinsic evildoer of aging, evildoers of aging, and I was like I say, when I when I read that, I was just thinking, you know, these are the bad guys. These are the guys, the villains that we have in our lives. Can you talk about who these extrinsic evildoers of aging are?
[00:11:53.400] – Dr. Frank Well, listen, smoking, drinking, excessive sun exposure, all these type of things, not moving, not eating right. Fatty foods. These are like the evil do's of aging. We all know that these things are bad for us. But I try and relate to my personal story. I'm 50. I'm in my 50 years old. I wasn't an angel. I was young once. I used to lay in the sun and drink more and do all these different types of things and you change your ways if you want to feel good as you age. Otherwise, if you act like a 20 year old at 50, you're not going to come out too well.
[00:12:27.750] – Dr. Frank I always say if I want to look and feel my best, I act like an old person. When I want when I try and act too much like a young person, I don't feel or look that good. But these evil doers of aging, let's say drinking and smoking, for example, we know they're bad from us. And I want to teach people how to moderate them. I give my personal story. I think a life of total restriction is a very boring life, not eating good foods, not not having a martini every once in a while.
[00:12:56.400] – Dr. Frank But I do believe that you could feel good and look good by finding a healthy balance. And as we get older, obviously those limitations may be coming a little restrictive. What society tells you is that there's always a pill, a cream, a shot, a coach or something that's going to be an antidote to all those things. And the fact of the matter is, the best way to treat yourself is just to learn how to moderate those evildoers. To not bake yourself in the sun doesn't mean you have to hide from the sun.
[00:13:24.000] – Dr. Frank So I think this balance, instead of selling people what they have to buy teaching people how to moderate and minimize these things and teaching them about the science and how it makes aging, I think works in teaching people how to live a better lifestyle.
SPONSOR
This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Fastic. Before we had refrigeration, processing and bulk transportation, we just didn't have access to food like we do today. Because we're opportunistic eaters, most of us consistently eat more than we should. And our bodies don't know how to signal to us that we've had enough. I practice intermittent fasting regularly, and it's a strategy many of my clients use to get control of food and as a happy side effect, lose weight.
Fastic is an app you can download on an Apple or Android smartphone. It's a pretty snazzy app with a lot of tools to help you do intermittent fasting right. It not only lets you track your fasting, but water consumption, steps and a lot of other things.
You can also connect with a fasting buddy to help keep you even more accountable. If you have an iPhone, go to 40plusfitnesspodcasts/ifastic. For an android, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast/afastic. If you're interested in learning more about intermittent fasting or just need some help getting started. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/ifastic for an iPhone. Or 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/afastic for an Android phone.
[00:15:08.280] – Allan One of the things that you got into and I thought was was really interesting was, you know, we we want to rule and I think people like simple stuff. And I can give them one rule out of this. No smoking. Just just don't do it.
[00:15:22.160] – Dr. Frank There is no moderation in that.
[00:15:23.610] – Allan There's no moderation in that one. But when we start talking about sun exposure, I'm like, a little bit of sun exposure is good for almost all of us and for other people. Even a little more is even OK. How does someone decide for themselves the right way that, OK, this is this is my line. This is where this makes sense for me and this doesn't.
[00:15:47.910] – Dr. Frank Well I get it. And I try and talk to a lot of dermatologists, but they are just like no sun, wear sun protective clothing. I can't do that. Dermatology is one of the few fields in medicine where we really have to judge people by the color of their skin and certainly anyone with a family history of skin cancer. I'm going to be more restrictive about. But people who tan easier, what we call type three skin, type six skin are like African American, Type four or five is like Hispanic, you know, type one and two skin are the fairest of people, like the blonde haired, blue eyed type.
[00:16:18.450] – Dr. Frank And those are the people that have to be more restrictive. But by the way, those people don't ever tan well, and they never look good that way. You know, the darker skin types, the J-Los, you know, they kind of tan well. So, again, sitting people down and giving them a realistic. And by the way, anyone with sunscreen used appropriately can enjoy the outside. There's no reason why they have to hide. I feel that way about martinis and beers, too, by the way. You know what I mean, not all people have the same tolerance level of alcohol.
[00:16:47.250] – Dr. Frank And by the way, smoking is bad as it is. The studies show people like, oh, I've been smoking my whole life. There's no point to quitting now. By the way, as a person who's been smoking a pack a day for most of their life, if they quit smoking in ten years, the risk of cancer goes down to almost that of a non smoker. So, you know, there's hope that's a positive thing for people to make changes in their lives. And that's kind of what I want to help people do.
[00:17:10.860] – Allan Yeah, absolutely. Now, you said something in the book that made my heart sing as a personal trainer. He said, the number one thing you can do for pro aging, longevity and beauty is to get moving.
[00:17:24.490] – Dr. Frank No question.
[00:17:25.380] – Allan OK, and I love that, obviously. So can you give us some tips so that we can put some more movement into our life?
[00:17:33.030] – Dr. Frank And my examples for myself and I like to work out four to six times a week. But you know what? It's not that forty five minutes a day that makes all the difference. It's taking the stairs instead of the elevator when you have the opportunity. It's like taking that walk instead of jumping into Uber, which by the way, functions as meditation, which functions as exercise, which functions on catching up on phone calls with friends and communication to your environment. It's just it's choosing sometimes the path that involves movement. And, you know, in a world where everyone is looking for a convenience, quick time, I think the best time you could spend is just moving your body.
[00:18:11.280] – Allan So in the book, you did share some fairly specific tips as far as you know, as we're going through how we can make this, I guess, a little bit more regular.
[00:18:21.210] – Dr. Frank Yeah.
[00:18:21.390] – Allan And I think a couple of them that you shared that I really like and you you actually got into this a good bit in the book is about negative self talk.
[00:18:30.710] – Dr. Frank Oh, yeah. I mean, listen, when we're younger, we look to make as many friends as we're getting older. We're looking to make as many professional social connections as we build our life and career. We all start off very naive and potentially influenced by people. And that's why our mothers, they want us hanging out with the good friends, not the bad friends. And we have to realize I have two children. I'm constantly trying to screen who they spend time with. Do I know their parents? Do I know the kids? Do I think it's a good kid. We have to look at ourselves in the mirror.
[00:18:59.820] – Dr. Frank Every day is our lives and we have to learn how to filter people. The content. And that's not just on our social media feed, it's on the people we spend our time with trying to spend our time around positive people because negative thinking breeds negative thinking, so do negative people. And I find myself I started doing transcendental meditation seven years ago with my wife and really taught me how to filter things in my own mind and try and surround myself with things that are going to be, they're going to promote positive things in my life. I think that's the most important tool that we that we can constantly think of.
[00:19:35.490] – Allan Yeah. With, you know, one of the things you brought up when you were talking about movement was you were being very clear that it doesn't have to be a gym. But, you know, in a lot of cases, I kind of compare and contrast that against what you just said is surrounding yourself around other people that are positive and into it. You know, if you can find a group class of pilates or something like that that you enjoy doing, by all means, do it.
[00:20:00.030] – Allan And as we're recording this, obviously a lot of gyms are not open. A lot of classes aren't happening. But they will reopen, they will come back and as they do, finding that thing that works for you, be it surfing, be it running, be it lifting, be it going and doing a pilates class, I think that's all very, very important.
[00:20:20.030] – Dr. Frank There's something out there for everybody. And that's kind of what I tried to say. You know, I try and tell people it's great getting word of mouth like, oh, I just tried this new workout app or I tried soul cycle. I did this. It's nice to get word of mouth to kind of get you to try new things. But people need to realize there's no one thing that works for everybody. And your expectation, sure. We like the communal aspect because it pushes us. I Was always a big soul cycle person, it just works for me. And it's nice to be pushed by your environment, but you have to realize you have to find your own way. And this is all about balance. And this is true in every aspect.
[00:20:58.010] – Allan And I think just just to go deeper into that, one of the things you said in the book is you really didn't consider yourself an athlete as a child, but as soon as you strapped roller skates because you're parents took you to roller skate rinks, boom, there you were every weekend.
[00:21:14.530] – Dr. Frank And, you know, and again, that's probably one of the reasons why I like Soul Cycle too, because it involves dancing in a form of exercise. My club days aren't so strong these days. You know, being on the dance floor until two o'clock in the morning is not that much of an option for me. But being around music, being inspired by other people, sweating around other people and feeling that that endorphin rush, that's what we all want.
[00:21:38.030] – Dr. Frank That's pro aging. What's great about you want to find things that you can age with. Swimming, tennis, walking up and down stairs, taking walks, cycling, you know, not everybody could box until their 70. Some people can. And I think I have yet to find a laser or device that works for aging like exercise does.
[00:22:01.610] – Allan And that's important. That's important here. So you're 50 and obviously someone that is in this profession. So looking your best, age in your best, that's kind of a part of who you are now. It's ingrained in you 20 years in the career. What is your pro aging regimen was what does your day look like?
[00:22:23.090] – Dr. Frank Well, my day starts with meditation. Got to reset. You know, I'm a person. I do sleep eight hours a night. And it's mostly because if I get less than six, I'm not fun to be around. Like, you know, I'm not I'm not one of those people who can get by in four hours of sleep like some people claim. I like to sleep well. I meditate. I usually spend a little time with the family because it's the only time I get when my head is clear, is really the morning. And then after that, I exercise every day because again, after a busy day, it's I'm not going to get to do that at night.
[00:22:56.380] – Dr. Frank And then I hit the pavement and I'm kind of on stage all day. I could see anywhere from 20 to 40 people go through my office every day and I obviously got to be on point for a lot of different people and a lot of different personalities. I try and have as much fun as possible, that's kind of my rule as I've done this 20 years. Is to keep it fun, keep it light. And and usually at the end of the day, I don't got that much left into me if I do have a work dinner or something like that or I go home to the family. But the meditation, the exercise are the prerequisite in terms of food. Again, I don't tell everyone to follow my technique, but I'm kind of not by choice a daytime faster I graze.
[00:23:40.730] – Dr. Frank I have a little things I maybe have like an avocado or I have some nuts or I take a bite, my sister runs my entire professional life so I could I can dip into her salad or take a few bites of a sandwich if I want to, without offending her. And then I really I have my meal, whatever I want at night. And on the weekends, I love to cook and I love to eat and I like to indulge. And that's really it. And before you know it you're turning 50.
[00:24:07.670] – Allan Yeah. And then 60 and 70 and then on.
[00:24:11.270] – Dr. Frank And that's it. I try and you know, my life I fortunately have a very successful career with a lot of challenges and a lot of rapid growth. So I'm constantly trying to remind myself about the people and the things, like keep it positive, keep it simple. Because the world wants to complicate things, wants to sell you more, wants to do more. And a lot of things seem exciting, like growing your business. Right. It's an exciting thing.
[00:24:34.310] – Dr. Frank But guess what? You constantly have to keep it in check. Is it going to give me more pleasure or is it going to give me more headaches? You know, and it's not easy. You know, I'm not always great at it. Catching covid and having 13 days of 103 fever and having problems breathing and having to be on home oxygen, that kind of put things a little bit more in perspective for me to check myself before I wreck myself. So I was very nervous about the pro aging playbook coming out about of course I started writing this way before covid.
[00:25:04.220] – Dr. Frank I was nervous about, oh my God, I'm doing a wellness book. But I actually reread it from beginning to end right before the book came out with a covid mind, and I'm excited that it came out now because a lot of it is just about the psychology of life.
[00:25:19.810] – Allan Well beyond that, I mean, one of the things that we're finding with regards to covid and the risk is just how well you've managed your fitness, your health, your, all of it. And if you're suffering from some health issues, obviously you're not you're not pro aging at this point. You're in decline. And this is a wake up call to all of us that taking care of our health is really the only thing that's in our control. We can't control what goes on at work. We can't control what's going on in the street. We can't control a killer virus that ravages the country. What we can do is control ourselves.
[00:25:59.890] – Dr. Frank And a lot of people said to me they were so shocked because of my social media. I kind of became this poster person for Covid. Cosmetic dermatologist has become the poster person for information for Covid. They said, I don't understand, you're so young and healthy. I said, well, I'm glad everyone thinks 50 is young that's a great start. But I said, well, I don't think of it like that. Like, oh, my God, I can't believe I got it. I do such things to take care of me.
[00:26:24.220] – Dr. Frank Maybe if I didn't take such good care of myself, I would have needed hospitalization or intubation or been one of those young people that died, you know what I mean? So I look at it the other way, like, thank God I was in good shape. So again, we've got to keep taking care of yourself. And along the way we might as well look good.
[00:26:42.090] – Allan Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if you know who Tony Horton is, the guy who did P90X.
[00:26:47.030] – Dr. Frank Yeah, of course.
[00:26:48.010] – Allan I had him on the show and he went through shingles at the age of like sixty, sixty one. And it would have for what it does to a lot of people, you know, him being generally fit and healthy. He's weathered it really well. But, you know, it really does kind of speak to me. Again, we don't know what's going to happen and if we're not taking care of our health, then we're setting ourselves up for something worse.
[00:27:15.550] – Dr. Frank Listen, you can invest money in the stock market, invest money in your own business. You can invest your time and energy and money in a lot of things. But there's one thing that is a guaranteed return on investment, and that is yourself. And that is whether you're exercising, eating right, doing something that makes you feel good about yourself. When you look in the mirror, everyone has a good hair day. I don't care how,
[00:27:39.370] – Allan You haven't seen a picture of me.
[00:27:41.350] – Dr. Frank But I do want to make fun of himself over another one. You don't have to be, you know, just having a little sense of vanity doesn't mean you're narcissistic. And I think any investment in yourself, in yourself, not for other people in yourself, is is is a 100% return on that investment.
[00:28:00.040] – Allan Yeah. Just just for the record, I shaved my head when I started receding. Rather than do anything about it, i just went with it. Yeah. It's the best decision I could have made. It really is.
[00:28:11.980] – Dr. Frank Thats good man. Is that that's keeping it simple stupid. That's the rule of kiss right there.
[00:28:16.180] – Allan Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Frank, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well.
[00:28:25.870] – Dr. Frank Well. And we talked about we talked about a couple of these. we talked about movement, moving your body for me, also meditation, and then investing in family and friends. Those are the three starts. All the other stuff comes once you have those three things in check.
[00:28:51.480] – Allan Absolutely so, Dr. Frank, thank you for being on the show. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book, The Pro Aging Playbook, where would you like for me to send them.
[00:29:02.090] – Dr. Frank Well, you could send them to my website at pfrankmd.com or they could check me out social media, Instagram, and Tic-Toc and Facebook, which is at Dr. Paul Jerod Frank.
[00:29:12.840] – Allan OK, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/451, and I'll be sure to have a link there. Dr. Frank, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:29:23.240] – Dr. Frank Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.
Post Show/Recap
[00:29:29.770] – Allan All right, I hope you enjoyed that episode as much as I did. Dr. Frank was a really cool conversation, and I know we've been talking about aging a lot, but, you know, with me being approaching my mid 50s, it's a topic I think about a lot. So maybe I've seen too many books about aging. We'll go off on to some different topics in a bit, although I think our next week's episode is also going to be about aging, but it's kind of a different approach.
[00:29:55.780] – Allan So we'll talk about that later. So, Rachel, Ras, why don't you take just a few minutes to introduce yourself, let folks know who you are and why you're here.
[00:30:05.740] – Rachel All right. Well, hi, Allen. Nice to talk to you again. My name is Rachel, and most of my friends call me Ras. That's a childhood nickname that I've had. And once you get to know me, it just seems fitting. But most people call me Ras and I'm forty nine, which is why I've always been a big fan of your podcast lately. I'm over 40 and I like to be fit. And I've recently finished my NASM certification. I just got my certificate to be a personal trainer, so I'm pretty excited about that.
[00:30:38.770] – Rachel Like I said, I'm forty nine. My husband Mike and I have been married for 25 years and we just celebrated our anniversary this last summer, which is great. And we both have we have two kids that are in college just starting off this next semester. One's at home and online learning and the others moved to campus. And so we're just hoping they stay safe in this covid era.
[00:31:02.470] – Allan Now, one of the reasons I thought that Rachel would be a great guest for the show is she is a huge advocate of running. In fact, anywhere Rachel goes, if there's not already a run club, there will be one.
[00:31:15.730] – Rachel Yes, yes, yes. Running has been a huge part of my life. I've been running consistently for over twenty years, actually. And it's served a different purpose at different times in my life. But everywhere I have traveled and we have traveled quite a bit, we've been in contact with different run clubs in different areas. And it's really a great way to meet friends especially when you move as often as we have. And I have some amazing friends that we've met down in Florida, including you and Tammy, your wonderful wife.
[00:31:49.000] – Rachel And it's it's always a great way to get to know the city as well while also staying healthy and fit. So, yeah, I've got a pretty big running background. I've run too many 5 and 10 Ks to count. I'm up to over thirty closing in on forty half marathons. I've done Four fulls, 2 Ultra's and this year I was supposed to be running another Ultra as well as my first 50 miler. But covid shut those races down pretty early. So this year it's just about running miles and enjoying the time outdoors.
[00:32:27.370] – Allan Yeah, I've been trying to put on some more mileage just but I'm not running right now. No one's chasing me and so I enjoy the walk. Plus, you know, for me it's not a function of time. I set my own schedule pretty much here. So if I want to get out, walk for three, three and a half hours, I'll go do it. And we have some beautiful beaches here. So kind of the cool thing is the further I walk, the more the better beaches I see.
[00:32:53.140] – Allan So it's like I start out the public beach is not all the all that pretty with the seaweed and everything in the water. It's just not all that pretty. Once I get to two miles, I start seeing prettier beaches and I get the four miles, I start seeing awesome beaches. And so by the sixth and seventh mile, it's just breathtaking, the Bluff Beach and things that are here for me to see. So it really kind of pushes me when you're walking in one direction that far and, you know, OK, well, I've got to walk back.
[00:33:19.510] – Allan So it's nothing for me to put on ten miles on a day just to get out and do a long walk. Three hours, nothing major, just listening to podcasts or audio books or things like that. And then when the batteries die on my headphones. I just now I get to listen to the surf.
[00:33:36.510] – Rachel It sounds wonderful.
[00:33:38.340] – Allan Yeah. So you did go for the NASM certified personal trainer. And I can tell folks, having done it myself, actually took that test twice, not because I failed it, but because I messed up on my recertification. I had to take it again. It's not a joke. It's not this is easy, go study for a week or weekend, and then go take a test. It's like a college-level course with a comprehensive final. So congratulations on that.
[00:34:07.420] – Rachel Thank you so much. Yeah, it was a little bit more intense than I thought it would be. And even even after twenty years of running and believe me, I do a ton of reading and researching on all things fitness related. I still learned so much from this class. It was it was really in-depth. And I can't wait to put what I've learned to good use.
[00:34:31.610] – Allan So, as you can see, Ras is the runner is also female and I am neither of those. So, you know, I think we're going to have a good rounded conversation as we go forward. So I invite you to come back, catch Ras and me as we discuss the different things that we're getting into with the podcast with life. So if you have questions, you know, feel free to send them to us. You can send them to Allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com and Ras and I will take a round of responding to some of those in this final section of each podcast.
[00:35:05.240] – Allan So Ras, thank you for being here today. Thank you for being a part of the podcast. I'm really excited for the direction we're going and just really excited to be working with you.
[00:35:14.420] – Rachel Thanks, Allan. Thanks for inviting me. I'm looking forward to this new opportunity. I really appreciate it.
Patreons
The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:
Due to recent events, I found myself in a very bad place. COVID-19 had drastically changed my everyday life, pulling out of my seasonal ketosis, decimating my exercise plan, and triggering me into several unhealthy eating habits. In fact, all of my healthy habits seemed to fall by the wayside. It was a major lifestyle change for the worse.
I knew I needed to change something. I went back to the simple things that had turned things around for me years ago. It started with a recommitment and positive self-talk. If I didn't want the fat bastard to come back (he was bearing down on me), I had to do what all successful people do. I had to pull myself up to my feet and do the simple things that were within my control.
I'm going to get a little raw during this discussion. Think of like a support group talk where I'm admitting my weaknesses, sharing my mental process, and showing you the small steps I took in a bit of a case study/success story. I hope to give you some tools to use that will give you a better chance of recovery, should you slip as I did.
Get the Slip-to-Success Cheat Sheet!
SPONSOR
This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is brought to you by Usual Wines, available in convenient single serve bottles. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/wine and use the coupon code fitness for $8 off.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Episode 450 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast. Thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness. I'm really glad you're here and I hope that you're someone that's actually gone back and checked out the other 449 episodes we've done, which include over 275 interviews. It's kind of crazy how many people I've talked to over the years about health and fitness. And today I want to talk about something that's really, really important to me because it's a personal experience.
It's something that happened to me recently. And I'm talking to a lot of people and it's happening to them, too. And I want to give you the tools to get past this. And so I'm going to call this episode, “How to Turn Each and Every Slip Up Into Success.” And yes, even the best of us, the best personal trainers, the best fitness people out there. Every once while we make a mistake, every once in a while we slip, it just happens.
We're human and you're human, too. And so a lot's been going on in the world. And I want to kind of talk about my perspective of going through all of this with COVID, with the racial strife in the United States and obviously an upcoming election. Things are really, really crazy in the United States. And it's really hard to be on social media and do those types of things, because, quite frankly, it's just it's scary and it's frightening and it's hurtful and, you know, just all these emotions that are coming out.
I want to talk about this a little bit and give you some of my perspectives. And then after that, I want to give you some tools, some tools to help you the next time you slip. This is a process that I developed to work with my clients because like myself, many of them were struggling. And as I was finding my way out of the dark, I laid some bread crumbs to help them along the way as well. And it's been beneficial to everybody that I've talked to using this method. So I want to share it with you now.
COVID-19 hit the United States in January. I think the first case was registered up in the State of Washington around January 20th. And since then, it grew and grew and grew and obviously has grown into something much bigger, but not quite as big as they projected. So that's the good news. But the reality of it is COVID affected just about every single human being on this earth.
It's changed the way we live. It's changed the way we do almost everything we do and it's changed what we can and can't do. I'm in Panama and I can tell you Panama did not treat COVID like a joke at all. In fact, once they started getting cases in Panama and they were concerned about the medical system being able to keep up, they shut us down. And when I say shut us down, I mean, they shut down all the businesses, every single one of them, except grocery stores and pharmacies.
There was nothing else, just the pharmacy. You could go to the ATM if you needed some money and the pharmacy. And that was it. And they shut us down to a point where I was allotted two hours, two days a week to go do my shopping and that was only for necessities. I wasn't to be out there walking around, getting exercise. I was out there to shop. And so this was my Tuesday morning and Thursday morning from 7:30 – 9:30am were the only times I was allowed outside of my apartment.
Women were allotted 3 days a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday again, all these times were based on your personal ID card. So your passport depending on whether you were a citizen or resident. Since I'm a resident, I went with my passport. So my time was set. If I was caught outside, they would you know, sometimes they're checking your ID if you're outside of those times or you're somewhere where there's obviously not a grocery store or pharmacy they would arrest you, take you in, and they were doing that for a lot of people.
They really locked us down and that went on for nearly six weeks. So they did slowly start kind of opening things up. And as I'm recording this, you know, sort of the last week of September, I mean, August I'm sorry, you know, they still we still are locked down on weekends. And that means from 7:00 pm on Friday afternoon and evening until 5:00 am Monday morning, we're not to be out and about.
So the police are patrolling. If they catch you out, they'll arrest you. We're required to wear masks. So the whole argument that a lot of people are having about masks or not to mask. They'll arrest you. So you wear a mask. So that's been Panama. We're still on a curfew, so I can't go out at night. So from 7pm to 5am, you can't be out. That's every day.
We're still in this general lockdown. We're trying to slow the spread of the disease in the hopes that a vaccine will come. And that's been my life. You know, my gym's closed down. I was locked in my apartment for four months or more, unable to go out more than a couple hours, twice a week. And quite frankly, I melted down. You know, it was a hugely stressful situation, just reading what was going on.
Even though I could focus a little bit on my clients and I could focus a little bit on my business, I wasn't able to really put my all into that because I was just really struggling with this huge trigger event in my life that scared the crap out of me when I first heard about it. And as a result, I did what most people do. I spent all my days reading articles.
And in fact, you know, because I'm a data geek. I'm an information geek. I was reading every single article I could get my hands on in my search criteria. I just basically would say COVID-19 coronavirus, but not anything that mentions President Trump. And so I removed all of that political garble that was going on because it removed all of, you know, the opinion and stuff that was out there. And it gave me the medical information, the studies, the things that were actually going on in the medical community. The discussions they were having, the treatments and the, you know, the discussions of how they were going to do you know, virus, I mean a vaccine.
I was reading up on this every single day. And the reality of that has hit me that it just really, it pushed me further down. It kept me depressed. It kept me just addled. I didn't have a solution in my own head how I was going to handle this and what it was going to mean to me, to my wife, to my family. You know, our parents are up there in ages. They're all in their 70s. And quite frankly, they're not in the condition to handle something like this.
It was just really, really devastating for me to be sitting here in Panama and think about the things I couldn't do. And even if I had gone up to the United States to be around family, I really wouldn't have been any help to them to protect them. It just would have been the same. So we decided to stay in Panama and we're stuck in our houses and our apartment.
As a result of the stress and everything that was going on, I kind of slipped. So my slip and it involved alcohol. It involved almost no movement. I did bring some equipment from the gym over to my apartment and it sat and gathered dust in the corner. The whole time, I didn't really even have any desire to work out, which was really, really strange for me. But the impact of what was going on in the world, the stress that I was feeling and just feeling incapable of doing anything about it really, really bothered me.
So the no movement, the alcohol, the eating crazy stuff, you know, here and there, the cumulative impact was huge and it was weight gain. You know, the COVID 15 is a real thing. I did my part. I gained my fifteen pounds and I felt terrible about it. But it was, you know, it was just a reaction to what was going on in my life. And it was a major slip for me health-wise. It was not something that I wanted. It was not something that I planned. Sometimes I do plan to gain some weight and enjoy myself and go have a couple of weeks of, you know, fun and crazy at an all-inclusive resort or at a football game or just on some vacation. But this was not that social media.
It was just driving me batty and, you know, as I was going through it. And then, of course, the violence and stuff that was starting to happen in the United States particularly, and all of that coming through, it was just huge. Now, with that, I did slowly start to come out of it and think about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.
So in a sense, this was very much a wake up call for me. I was sitting around thinking, you know. Why am I so bothered by this and what is really driving my behavior? What's the lesson out of all of this? And the reality of it was a few things. One is, you know, I'm watching videos of kind of crazy violent stuff happening. And I'm you know, I'm watching a woman or a man and they're in their 50s around my age and they're getting beat up and they're not able to defend themselves, are not able to help themselves.
And I'm watching people die, not necessarily watching them die, but hearing about the deaths and realizing that they're dying. Not necessarily because they got COVID because a lot of people were getting COVID and just moving on with their lives, recovering and moving on. But there are people just that couldn't recover and they couldn't recover because they just basically weren't taking care of themselves. So, you know, the first realization that came out of this was that COVID-19 is not the Spanish flu.
You know, that we want to compare it to the last pandemic. But the reality is this is apples and oranges. We know how germs pass now. They didn't know as much back then when Spanish flu was going on. And really the only reason that we're having to deal with COVID as much as we are, because in a real sense, it wouldn't be much worse than a flu if we were all healthy. But that's the point. Our health is crap in the United States.
You know, two-thirds of people are overweight, one third are obese, pre-diabetes, diabetes is just rampant. Heart disease is the number one killer. And, you know, as I'm recording this, I was thinking, you know, people aren't taking care of themselves. And right now and like I said, as I'm recording this, you know, there have been 180,000 deaths in the United States, which is tragic. But what we don't think about is there's 480,000 tobacco-related deaths every year.
So if you count the 7 months that COVID's been around as of this point in the United States, it's killed 180,000 and 280,000 have died of tobacco-related illness. Now, I know there's an overlap there. And so what COVID is actually doing, rather, we want to admit it to ourselves or not, is it's just accelerating our death.
SPONSOR This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Fastic before we had refrigeration, processing and bulk transportation, we just didn't have access to food like we do today because we're opportunistic eaters. Most of us consistently eat more than we should. And our bodies don't know how to signal to us that we've had enough. I practice intermittent fasting regularly, and it's a strategy many of my clients use to get control of food and as a happy side effect, lose weight. Fastic is an app you can download on an Apple or Android smartphone. It's a pretty snazzy app with a lot of tools to help you do intermittent fasting, right. It not only lets you track your fasting, but water consumption, steps and a lot of other things.
Now, we talked about aging last week and a little heads up the next couple episodes are also about aging because as I was going through my moments, I was just thinking, you know, we're aging and we need to be healthy. And so how do I teach people how to age better? How do I teach them to be healthy longer? Because we don't want to go out that way. And, you know, so, you know, we have to take responsibility for our own health.
You know, I had to take responsibility for my health and my fitness. So, you know, when I see some 50-year-old guy getting pummeled or some 50-year-old woman getting pummeled, I have to think in terms of if I were in the United States walking around and got into that situation, am I the victim that they're going to be looking to mess with or am I someone who basically looks like I can take care of myself because I'm in good health and I'm reasonably fit.
It's not that you have to look like Mike Tyson to survive in this world, but the reality is they're much less likely to victimize you, to bully you, to attack you if it looks like you might be able to hurt them back. And so I don't want to throw this out there and really upset a lot of people, but, hey, if this is you, get a little upset, you know, that's OK. This was my wake up call.
If I'm going to take care of my loved ones, I've got to be there for them. I've got to be able to do the things that are necessary, you know, and it goes beyond being able to help my wife out of a wheelchair 30 years from now. It goes to the fact that if someone sees me walking with my wife, they just see me as someone to just pass on because they don't want to attack me.
If a COVID virus or something like that, something similar to this comes again, like I am generally now, I want to be healthy. I want my vitamin D to be where it's supposed to be. I want my B vitamins and zinc. I want all those things in my food so that I'm already healthy. In fact, I stepped up my supplementation because I was locked in an apartment. I've got vitamin D, I've got zinc, you know, like it's almost like a medicine cabinet kind of thing, which I normally wouldn't do, but I just didn't want to take chances.
Being locked in an apartment, limited access to the food. I mean, I have access to food, but it's the same food. So just making sure that the varieties there I've started supplementing. And so I was able to kind of turn this around and I turned it around and I started thinking, you know what I'm doing? All I'm doing is the basic thing that successful people do. The way you get success in this world is you learn from your failures and you do that by doing three things, and that's what I want to share with you.
This is my three-step plan for recovery when you slip. So pay particular attention to this one.
OK, so the first thing is to forgive yourself. And this is the most important thing if you don't really forgive yourself and I mean really like self-love deep. I made a mistake. I screwed up. I shouldn't have sat there and drank myself silly and ate myself silly and sat on my couch reading about COVID virus, things that really weren't going to impact my life or improve my life.
And I did those things for six solid weeks. I can't do that again, but I need to recognize that there were triggers, there were things that made me do that that were out of my control, and I didn't take the moment to stop myself and stay in control. So that's on me. But I have to forgive myself. So I accept responsibility and I forgive. And from that forgive. Now you're ready to move to the second step.
The second step is what did you take away from that moment? What was the learning experience of that moment? So for me, it's when I hit a really stressful period of time, I need to move. I need to move one way or another. Rather, they lock me in an apartment where they really lock me in a room or they lock me in a bathroom. I need to move and I'm going to move next time. If something like this happens and they lock us down, I'm still going to move. I'm going to keep moving as long as I possibly can because that's really helped me.
Since I got out of this, I've been walking regularly. I've been lifting regularly when they started letting me out to do other things besides shop. So I've been doing those things. And it's meant a world of difference, having that movement in my life, doing the meditations, doing the things that are going to relieve the stress, that will keep me from the actions that are detrimental to me. So I learned a lot out of this about myself.
You know, your trainer is not perfect. I'm human and I have to accept that and I have to act on that when something bad is happening, I have to recognize the symptoms and I've got to do something about it. So I've I've changed up a few things in my morning rituals. I've gone through some training. I've done some extra work on myself, mentally, physically. And that's helped me a whole lot. Moved way past where I was.
Now the third. And again, I'm not going to say this is the most important because really the forgiving is. But if you don't act on what you're supposed to do, you set that plan. You're like, OK, I'm going to meditate every morning. I'm going to go for long walks. I'm going to commune with nature. I'm going to get as much vitamin D as I can possibly get by supplementing and getting out in the sun. I'm going to do these actions to protect myself, to make myself stronger, to make sure that I'm the person my loved ones deserve. Then that's the action and that's when you have to do it. Now, what I did as a part of my action was, you know, I stepped up and said, you know, I'm going to go ahead and launch and do a round of what I call eight weeks to WOW.
And unfortunately, as you're hearing this, we've closed out on the third round, which might actually be the last time I do this in 2020. But I went through eight weeks to WOW with the first group that went through and we were all seeing great success, which was really up-lifting. And I, basically going through that program, lost 12 pounds. And then I went through my Strong, Lean Over 40 program, which, you know, I sell it as a program which is a strongly energetic program and then basically lifting part, which would be the coaching part.
And I've been doing that now for about three or four weeks. And I'm down below my pre COVID weight. So the fifteen pounds that I gained, I've lost more than that since May 1st. And I did that because I went through that three-step recovery plan. You know, the three-step plan is to forgive, to learn and plan and then act. OK, so you've got to do those three steps before you're going to get past this, because if you don't forgive, you won't recover.
If you don't set a plan, learn something and set a plan, then you won't step in the right direction. And if you don't actually act, then you're not stepping at all. So it takes all three of these in that order for you to be successful at recovering from a slip. So if you want to go from slip to success, you take those three steps. Now, I'm going to offer you a free gift.
If you go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/slip. I'm going to have a little cheat sheet. I call it the slip to success cheat sheet and it's going to kind of walk you through those three steps and give you a little bit of insight into each one and how to apply it in your life. So go ahead and go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/slip and you can download the plan, the cheat sheet and it'll be like I said, it will kind of walk you through.
So if you're finding yourself right now sitting there saying I'm a victim of the COVID 15, you're not a victim, stop being a victim, take action, forgive yourself, set a plan and take action. And this little gift, this little cheat sheet is going to help you get on that track. So you are not a victim. We are not victims. We are in control of our future. We write our own next chapter. Our next chapter hasn't happened.
Now, we have an option right now to take out the pen that we've been writing our life with, and we get to write a new story starting today, so if you're ready to do that, to get this cheat sheet and then reach out to me and let me know what I can do to help you be successful in your journey forward. So I appreciate you being on the podcast today.
The next couple of episodes are going to be about aging. They're really good conversations. I was in kind of an aging mindset as I was going through the last month. And this is what came out of it. We ended up with a theme like that. But, you know, the world is not always positive and it's really, really hard for us to keep moving forward when things just seem to be falling.
You know, at some point, Sharknado is probably going to happen in 2020 because, you know, it's been that kind of year. We kind of laugh about, you know, we're going. But there are two hurricanes coming into the Gulf of Mexico as I'm recording this. So, yeah, it's just a really, really strange year with a lot of stressors in front of us. And having a plan is going to help. Now, the core of all of this, and I want you to start this today, is I need you to start using positive self taught and using positive thinking, have a positive outlook.
I know it's hard, but you're currently healthy. You're currently in good shape, at least more in better shape than being on the other side of the grass. You're listening to this. So just recognize that you do have control in rewriting your future and you can start today. So make that conscious decision to start and then recommit.
Go back to your why and your vision. As we talked about in the Wellness GPS, if you have those two things, they're always going to be that rock, that foundation that keeps you solid and on your feet ready to move forward. OK, so when you take that recommit, you get into it, boom, I'm in. And then you go through and you go through that three-step plan. You're going to make this happen for yourself. I have no doubt whatsoever.
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[00:57:20.230] – Allan
[00:02:55.110] – Allan
